#and not only that but i watched an interview with katie holmes about the sex scene in this movie

[joshjacksons]

Joshua Jackson interview with "Mr Porter" (2021)

Minutes before Mr Joshua Jackson joins me in a booth for a Friday afternoon drink at a vibey hotel bar in Santa Monica, he’s confronted by his past. Or rather, a woman in her early twenties who is binge-watching Dawson’s Creek, the teen show about a close-knit group of high-school friends coming of age in a sleepy American town, which made Jackson incredibly famous between 1998 and 2003. The series, which also made household names of Ms Michelle Williams and Ms Katie Holmes, went off air 18 years ago, but is now streaming on Netflix, to the bemusement of Jackson, who played lovable rogue Pacey Witter. “This girl was like, ‘Are you...?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I am. He got old. I’m sorry to break it to you,’” he says, before ordering an iced tea and a charcuterie board to tide him over until dinner time. “It always surprises me when young people say they’ve just got into Dawson’s Creek. I’m like, ‘Is it a costume drama to you? Do you feel like you’re watching a historical documentary?’”

The idea of a Friends-style reunion episode or a Sex And The City revival feels equally far-fetched to Canadian-born Jackson, now 43 and wearing it well in a pale green linen shirt and tailored linen trousers by Oliver Spencer that complement his fading brown hair and Cali-tanned skin.

“I don’t know why you’d want to [bring it back],” he says. “Nobody needs to know what those characters are doing in middle age. We left them in a nice place. Nobody needs to see that Pacey’s back hurts. I don’t think we need that update.”

And Jackson doesn’t need Dawson’s Creek. From Mr JJ Abrams’ sci-fi series Fringe (2008-2013) to the Golden Globe award-winning The Affair (2014-2019), from Ms Ava DuVernay’s ground-breaking true-crime drama When They See Us (2019) to the recent Ms Reese Witherspoon and Ms Kerry Washington-produced Little Fires Everywhere (2020), he has commanded the small screen – with a collection of dynamic and diverse work – ever since.

His latest role as Mr Christopher Duntsch, the Texas surgeon convicted of gross malpractice when 33 of his patients were left seriously injured after he operated on them and two of them died, in chilling Peacock crime drama Dr Death, is only stepping his career up another gear.

“I’ve never played anyone irredeemable before,” says Jackson, who is joined in the eight-part series (based on the 2018 Wondery podcast of the same name) by Messrs Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin. “He is charming, gregarious and has a high-level intellect, but he’s also a misogynist, probably a sociopath, certainly a narcissist and a complete incompetent who is incapable of seeing himself.”

If Duntsch is terrifying, then Jackson’s portrayal is even more so. The artist formerly known as Pacey is virtually unrecognisable (thanks to prosthetics) in the opening scene, but the real challenge for Jackson was allowing himself to view someone who is so “spectacularly evil” as a human being in order to walk in his shoes. “It’s a more damning portrayal of the man to make him into a human being, rather than just make him the bad guy,” he says. “He really believes he’s the hero, he’s the genius and that he’s the victim, so once I got past my own judgment, all the other things fell into place.”

Jackson might have his pick of stellar roles – and challenges – now, but it has not happened by accident. Take it from someone who has been in the business since landing his first job aged 14 in Disney’s live-action movie series The Mighty Ducks, opposite Brat Pack alumnus Mr Emilio Estevez.

“You try to make it look like it happens accidentally,” he says, “but there is no way to do this and not be ambitious. I’d say I’m extremely ambitious because I’ve been doing this cutthroat job for nearly 30 years. I’m in the pay-off phase of my career now. One of the benefits of surviving for as long as I have is you get to learn from your own mistakes.”

Such as? “I wouldn’t say, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that,’ because it all becomes bricks in a path, but [after Dawson’s Creek] I was not choosy enough about the things I was doing. You get stuck. You start trying to perform the performance you think people are hoping to see you do. I was so used to working all the time that I just worked all the time. There was definitely a conscious moment in my mid-twenties when I realised I wasn’t really enjoying the work that I was doing. My manager at the time just said, ‘Take a breath. You’re burnt out.’”

The turning point came in 2005, when Jackson was offered a role in the two-hander Mr David Mamet play A Life In The Theatre, opposite Sir Patrick Stewart. “God bless him, Patrick could have made my life miserable because I had no idea what I was doing, ” he says. “I hadn’t been on stage since I was a kid and now I was in the West End in over my head. But it reminded me that I actually enjoyed being an actor, that it’s not about the red carpet or travelling around the world. What I really enjoy is working on good material with good people.”

It’s no surprise Jackson’s time on Dawson’s Creek led to a career crisis. From the ages of 19 to 24, he lived with his fellow cast mates in Wilmington, North Carolina, filming day in, day out, in an arrangement he likens to college. “You get to the end and they’re like, ‘Here’s your degree. Go live now. You’re an adult. Go out into the world,’” he says.

But most graduates don’t have to deal with global fame. “It’s transitory. You’re only ever cool for a moment and then you become much less cool. I was always pretty dubious about flatterers,” he says, recalling a time he was stung in London in the mid-2000s. “I went on a date in Hyde Park with a woman whose name I will not use – she was socialite-famous – and she was acting completely bizarre, looking over her shoulder the whole time. I came to find out that she had hired a photographer to follow us through the park and gave a whole story to the tabloids about how I was going to meet her family.”

It was his growing fortune, rather than fame, that caused Jackson the most anxiety. “Suddenly, at 19 years old, I was making more in a week than most of my friends’ parents would make in a year,” he says. “It was lovely to have the money, but it was that feeling of nobody is worth that kind of money. You feel like a fraud and it took me a long time to forgive myself for not being the thing that I was perceived as.”

Born in Vancouver, but raised in Topanga, California, until he was eight (before moving back to Vancouver following his parents’ divorce), Jackson bought his childhood home in 2001 and lives in it today with his wife, British Queen & Slim actor Ms Jodie Turner-Smith, and their 15-month-old daughter.

“My father unfortunately was not a good father or a husband and exited the scene, but that house in Topanga was where everything felt simple, so it was a very healing thing for me to do,” he says. Fast-forward to 2021 and his baby daughter now sleeps in her father’s childhood bedroom. “There was a mural of a dragon on the wall in that room that I couldn’t believe was still there, years later. The owner [who sold him the house] said, ‘I knew it meant a lot to somebody and that they were going to come back for it some day.’”

Becoming a first-time parent during a pandemic sounds stressful, but it afforded Jackson months at home with his wife and child that his normal work schedule wouldn’t have allowed.

“I now recognise how perverse the way that we have set up our society is,” he says. “There is not a father I know who works a regular job who didn’t go back to the office a week later. It’s robbing that man of the opportunity to bond with his child and spend time with his partner.”

Despite his obvious career ambitions, fatherhood has changed Jackson’s priorities in “every possible way”, he says. “It’s 100 per cent changed how I approach my work and my life. That has been made so clear to me in this past year. For me to feel good about what I’m doing day to day, my family has to be the central focus.

“There are plenty of things left for me to do, but now the thing that gets me excited is experiencing the world through my daughter’s eyes. I can’t wait to take her scuba diving. I can’t wait to take her skiing. I can’t wait to read a great book with her. I’m not worried at all she’ll be a wallflower. She’s been a character from the word go.”

Jackson met Turner-Smith, 34, two days after his 40th birthday. He had been single since his 10-year relationship with German actress Ms Diane Kruger ended in 2016. “I was not looking to fall in love again or meet the mother of my child, but life has other plans for you,” he says.

The couple met at a party. Turner-Smith was wearing the same The Future Is Female Ejaculation T-shirt Ms Tessa Thompson’s character, Detroit, wears in the 2018 film Sorry To Bother You. “That’s what I used to break the ice. I shouted, ‘Detroit!’ across the room. Not the smoothest thing I’ve ever done, but it worked. We were pretty much inseparable from the word go. It was a whirlwind romance and I can tell my daughter I literally saw her mother across a room and thought, ‘I have to be next to this woman.’”

A self-confessed “useless” shopper, Jackson gives his wife full credit for his current wardrobe. He is jewellery-free, apart from a wedding band and a gold signet “JJ” ring on his little finger (a present from his wife), and discovered tailored sweatsuits (by Stampd and Reigning Champ) in the pandemic.

“Jodie has influence in the way that a wonderful wife encourages you, through love, to dress well. She was like, ‘We’re going to throw away all the sweatpants from your past and I’m going to get you some that actually make you look like an adult male and you will still feel comfortable around the house,’ and I’m like, ‘What an amazing idea!’ Who knew you could get sweatsuits that actually look good on your body?”

Jackson’s style has evolved, he says, “from slovenly teen to it’s-nice-when-your-clothes-actually-fit-you”. The penny dropped after he auditioned for his former co-star Estevez, who was directing the 2006 Mr Robert Kennedy biopic Bobby. He said to me, ‘You only got this job because I know you. You came in here to play a very well-put together 1960s political operative and you’re wearing jeans and a hoodie.’

“I had to grow up a little bit. We are very much raised in Canada to never, ever show off, so it took me a while to recognise it’s OK to look good when you go out.”

Still, when you’ve grown up in front of the camera, “every pimple literally documented”, and lived (very successfully) to tell the tale, you can probably be forgiven for the odd fashion faux pas.

“I wore a silk Ascot to an event once in Paris and I still have nightmares about it,” he says. “I looked like Fred from Scooby Doo, but you live and learn.”

[time-traveling-hoodie]

Miss Meadows - Picnic Scene

[amplesalty]

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

A not so random review...

What’s this, content outside of the periods of October or December? Well, I guess you could call this striking while the iron is hot-ish, and trying to keep the ball rolling after I actually made it through a whole October for once. That and this is laying the groundwork for something a little further down the line.

Summarizing this as ‘the Indian dude from Van Wilder and the Asian dude from American Pie’ almost feels a little lazy but I think that’s literally how it was advertised at the time. Apparently John Cho’s character in Pie is who we have to thank for the popularization of the term ‘MILF’. As for Kal Penn, I had totally forgotten he’d worked under President Obama for like nearly two years.

It’s Cho I’m more familiar with though, primarilly down to his turn on the short lived TV show Off Centre that I would watch in the early 2000’s when it aired in the middle of the night on a Friday/Saturday and I had nothing better to do. That show was notable for having a lot of people from American Pie working on it and doing cameos. That and having Brit Sean Maguire in it for some reason. I think watching Cho on there is how I came to watch this because Chau rules, it says so on the wall. He was on FlashForward too, I keep referencing that. He’s arguably the more succesful of the duo, doing the new Star Treks over the past decade or so and he had that movie Searching last year which I think got a lot of buzz due to him being the lead and that was a first for an Asian-American actor. That and it takes place entirely over computer and phone screens so that’s a bit of a unique presentation. Kinda like Unfriended being done over Skype.

There’s a bit of an odd couple situation going on between Harold and Kumar, Harold being a more repressed, law abiding type (apart from the rampant weed use) and Kumar being the more outgoing, messy type who will shave his pubic hair in your room because you have the full length mirror and wont see any problem in that. After getting high, the pair have a craving for some White Castle and this starts our whole whacky adventure.

An adventure that wont include their stoner neighbours who would prefer to stay home and watch ‘The Gift’ because they get to see a topless Katie Holmes. Dude, it’s 2004, I’m pretty sure you can just look at them online by now. They later describe her tits as the opposite of the Holocaust which is certainly an interesting description. Try that as a chat up line, I’m sure it will end well. Their neighbours being David Krumholtz, notable for his role in Numb3rs or, more pertinent to this blog, the lead elf in The Santa Clause. Then there’s Eddie Kaye Thomas who was also in American Pie and Off Centre, I feel like he kinda fell off the face of the earth after that though.

They serve as an early example of the cameos that this movie will through at you, which I suppose is fitting for a road trip movie, the story is just passing through all these locations so you get a brief look at these new characters before moving on. But there’s a ton of them in here, so many recognisable people from Fredd Willard, Ryan Reynolds, Christopher Meloni and…ugh, Jamie Kennedy. We’ll save the most prominent one though…

I wasn’t really feeling this at first, mostly because it takes a while for anything of interest to happen. Like, one of their early stops is Princeton because they’re trying to score more weed but most of the time is spent with Harold and this really boring group of nerds that seem to idolise him. Kumar hits it off with these two British chicks but we then get a prolonged sequence of fart jokes with them in the toilet playing ‘Battleshits’. I have no clue on how the mechanics of this game work, I guess it’s just whoever gets the loudest fart scores as a hit?

Things pick up when the movie starts embracing absurdity, like when Harold gets bitten by a racoon so they have to go to the hospital and Kumar swipes his Dad’s security pass so they can go steal medical marijuana. Only, they both get ushered into the operating theatre to operate on a guy who’s been shot.

Or the mechanic called Freakshow who has all sorts of boils over his face and a cuckoldry relationship with his wife who he invites our two heroes to have sex with.

Speaking of sex, they also happen to pick up a very horny Neil Patrick Harris who isn’t interested in their talk of White Castle and wants to go get laid at the strip club instead. The wikipedia page for the movie describes NPH as playing ‘a fictionalized version of himself’, would that be the part where he’s off his tits on ecstasy or the part where he’s attracted to women?

For all of it’s cameos, there’s almost an anti-cameo in the form of this cop who writes Harold a ticket for jay walking for taking like a step out into the road at 2am with no cars around. He just looks recognisable in some way but I can’t see that the actor has done anything of note. Maybe it’s just because he looks like a low rent Ron Burgundy.

The movie suddenly decides to develop some social commentary here with this heavy handed display of racial profiling where the police arrest an African-American man for a shooting in spite of the fact he’s at sleeping at the time. They’re processing him in his pajamas and night mask for God’s sake!

This does bring us the dream sequence of Kumar having a love affair with a big bag of weed though. You know the type, the slow motion running into each others arms? Well this goes a step further by having him fuck the bag, get married and then go through this marital strife where he backhands her for making some bad coffee before having to comfort her.

And then the pair get high with a cheetah and ride it around because NPH stole their car. You see what I mean about the absurdity?

Thankfully they do finally make it to White Castle, at about 7am, and indulge in a mammoth order of 30 sliders, 5 french fries and 4 large Cherry Cokes. And that’s just for one of them. Times that order by two and it all comes to $46.75. I know those burgers are only small but they still feels pretty cheap for all that food.

And for as much as this does feel like one big advertisement, they really go the whole hog by having this food seemingly give these characters epiphanies in their lives. Kumar is no longer satisfied with avoiding life, he’s finally going to knuckle down and nail one of those university interviews because as much as a stereotype as it is, there’s probably a lot worse things to be than an Indian doctor. And Harold finally stands up to his jerk boss who dumped all his work on him because those Asians just love crunching numbers.

He even gets the confidence to talk to the hot chick in their apartment building but it sucks that it took him until now to strike up a relationship because she’s going to Amsterdam for the next 10 days. Clearly this calls for another crazy adventure because you can’t just leave things like that for the best part of two weeks, plus you know what’s legal in Holland…only, knowing the title of the next movie, I don’t know if they ever make it that far…

I feel there’s a weird mix of tones with this movie, I think it excels when you have your far out moments of drug related dream sequences or cheetah based road trips but it’s pulled down to reality with these really harsh scenes of just explicit racism and this message of standing up for yourself. Again, knowing the sequel, that whole race thing seems to remain quite a strong focal point of the movie….

[gretamaya]

Title: And We All Fall Down, Chapter 4

Summary: Jyn and Cassian enjoy spending time together on the press tour for their movie.

Notes: Based on @operaticspacetrash‘s moodboard about a fake celebrity pr relationship.

AO3/1655 words (Chapters 1, 2, 3)

Jyn woke with Cassian pressed along side her, his forehead touching the base of her neck. By his even breathing, Jyn guessed he was still asleep.

While Jyn enjoyed the relaxed feeling of his arm around her, she was also trying not to panic. They had left the US behind to promote the movie in Asia, their current stop being Tokyo. The night before, celebrating with the rest of the promotional crew the success of the opening weekend in America, there had been drinking (well, Jyn had been drinking, Cassian was still too scared of Leia) and dancing and, afterwards, alone in their hotel room, when she had pulled Cassian close to continue the dancing, he had kissed her, even though no one had been watching. She had pulled away in confusion, looking around for the hidden camera, when Cassian had laughed softly at her, a deep, lovely sound that delighted Jyn more than anything else had so far that evening, and said, no, there’s no one here, just us, I’m kissing you because I want to, is that okay? And Jyn said yes, and they kept going, until Cassian was pulling her down on the bed, most of their clothes discarded. Jyn pulled back, Cassian asking her what was wrong, Jyn asking him if he was sure, if he really wanted her, if- and Cassian, out of relief that she wasn’t pulling back because he had hurt her, assured her that, yes, he really did want her, was she sure she wanted to do this, did she have too much to drink? And she had assured him she had stop drinking hours ago - really, they had spent so much time reassuring one another that Jyn was surprised they ever got to the sex part, but they had both been really determined.

Now, though, Jyn found herself wondering if he had just been saying stuff to get her to sleep with him. She tried to comfort herself with the reminder that she wasn’t his type. 

When he woke, he kissed the base of her neck, pulling her closer. That calmed Jyn down some - she let herself relax further into his arms. At least he didn’t seem to be upset about this situation.

Both of their alarms went off at the same time, leading to a lot of complaining as they tried to reach over one another for their phones.

Instead of doing what their phones were telling them to do, they settled back down in bed, facing one another. “What is it?” Jyn asked, as she traced a line down Cassian’s jaw, letting her fingers play with the hair at the base of his neck. Cassian looked ridiculously pleased.

“I just-” Jyn tugged a bit. He smiled wider and licked his lips, his eyes closing briefly. “I just… want to be with you… and have it not be an act.”

“So don’t act.”

He searched her face intently. “Okay.”

Jyn had wondered what ‘not acting’ meant to him, if it meant no longer holding her hand or putting an arm around her waist, but it turned out he meant to do more for her - brushing her hair back when it fell in her face, a thumb brushing along her hip out-of-sight of any cameras, all the small, intimate touches that were too much for a fake relationship. It was all so incredibly reassuring that Jyn just sort of wanted to melt into the floor. She hoped no one noticed.

“I thought the two of you were professionals,” said Draven as he approached where they were waiting to go out on stage. Jyn cringed. So much for no one noticing. “You weren’t actually supposed fall for one another.” He didn’t bother to hide his displeasure.

Jyn opened her mouth to retort, the last thing she wanted was Draven laying into Cassian again, when Cassian gave him his brightest smile and put his arm around Jyn, resting his chin on Jyn’s head. Jyn wondered what sort of picture they made.

With astonishment, Jyn watched Draven almost imperceptibly soften. Cassian and Draven’s relationship was so weird. 

*

“I slept with Cassian.”

Suddenly, Bodhi was wide awake. Jyn, it was Jyn calling him in the middle of the night. Jyn, who was in Tokyo, promoting her movie with Cassian.

“How was it?” 

“It was good, he- Bodhi,” Jyn hissed.

“You were about to describe sex with Cassian, please continue,” Bodhi encouraged her.

Jyn huffed on the other end of the line.

“It’s god-only-knows what time in the morning, it’s the least you could do.” 

“Did I wake you? Oh, sorry, I forgot-”

“I know, Jyn, don’t worry about it,” Bodhi reassured her as he pushed himself into a sitting position on the floor, leaning against his bed. He had fallen off it trying to answer his phone. He wasn’t terribly coordinated at this hour of the day. He didn’t blame Jyn, though. She was traveling so much she didn’t even know what time zone she was in, let alone what time it was for anyone else.

“This doesn’t affect the contract, does it?”

“There’s nothing in there saying you can’t sleep with him.”

“It says we have to break up, though.”

“It’s just for show. Break up, get back together, the studio won’t care.”

“I don’t want to hurt him.”

Bodhi wasn’t concerned about her hurting him - Cassian could handle himself - but he was concerned about Jyn’s career. Now that the movie was out in the US and doing well, opportunities for Jyn were rolling in, helped, no doubt, by the fact that she had behaved herself on her last movie set even without Cassian. This had lead to horribly misogynistic articles about how Cassian had ‘tamed’ Jyn, that had left Jyn ranting to Bodhi over the phone about them - and nothing else. In the past, such press would have caused Jyn to disrupt whatever project she was working on by punching the next person who looked at her the wrong way. This time, nothing happened besides Jyn voicing her displeasure. Even Cassian ‘cheating’ didn’t seem to get to her - she had just seemed disappointed. Of course, it was Cassian who had been a holy terror on his last movie set, as though Jyn had passed the crazy on to him. Bodhi desperately hoped Cassian wasn’t going to pass it back. Wait - now he was thinking like those misogynistic articles. Damn, he really needed to stop reading them.

Right. Jyn, her career, his job. And now, apparently, her personal life. Bodhi pressed a hand to his face, trying to make himself think properly at an hour of the day he shouldn’t even be awake. 

“Look, do what the studio wants you to. It’s just for show. Your actual relationship with Cassian is private. You don’t ever need to post anything, acknowledge anything, talk about anything. Think of Katie Holmes and Jamie Foxx. Or do the opposite. Just see this contract through.”

“Okay. Thanks, Bodhi.” Jyn sounded relieved.

“You good?”

“I’m good.”

They said their good-byes and hung up, Bodhi climbing back into bed with the hope of a few more hours of sleep until he had to get up for real.

*

Leaning against one another near a wall, taking a few moments from their busy day, as others set up their next interview around them, Cassian asked Jyn if she had any plans immediately after the press tour was done.

Jyn shook her head. “I was just planning to go home and relax.” 

“Would you like to go somewhere with me instead?”

That’s when it hit Jyn - that this was a real relationship, something he wanted to continue, and that when the studio stopped arranging everything for them, they would have to do it themselves. Jyn had no real idea how to do this, her relationships were always so volatile and her schedule so random that she could go months without seeing whoever she was seeing at the time. She didn’t want that to happen with Cassian. They hadn’t planned this, in the way that their entire relationship had been mapped out from beginning to end but their actually falling for one another was never part of the deal. 

“I would.” Jyn couldn’t keep herself from smiling, as she watched the controlled chaos around her. Jyn’s mind immediately went to sunning on the beach next to a mostly-naked Cassian. “Some place warm?”

“I, uh, was thinking the opposite, actually.” She looked at him skeptically. “So, you know, we could… make one another warm.”

Jyn saw what he was getting at and grinned at him. “With skiing?”

“Do you ski?”

“No, you?”

“No,” he said, laughing a bit. “I guess we can find someone to give us lessons.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“It does.”

*

After an exhausting round of solo interviews, Jyn was happy to see Cassian waiting for her, but her happiness turned sour when she got closer and saw the look on his face. “What is it?” she asked, not wanting to know the answer.

Cassian, not wanting to tell her, instead held out his phone, letting her read the news. Is Orson Krennic Jyn Erso’s real father? the headline screamed in bold print. Scrolling through the article, Jyn learned that Krennic was claiming to have slept with her mother behind her father’s back for years. Further, Krennic claimed that he had to push Jyn’s father to do more for her mother when her mother had gotten sick, because her father knew about the infidelity. So did Jyn, that’s why her relationship with her ‘father’ was so strained.

Feigning calm, Jyn turned from Cassian and walked into the nearest bathroom. She had no idea if it was for men or women, and she didn’t care. Locking herself in, she threw the phone as hard as she could against the wall, watching it shatter all over the bathroom floor, leaving a dent in the drywall.

She had been so happy.

[deniscollins]

Being Transgender at Goldman Sachs

Michael. DuVally, worked at Goldman Sachs for 15 years, is 58 and twice divorced, with three children. He then appeared at work wearing women’s clothing as Maeve DuVally and informed you about being transgender. Assume some workers respond inappropriately. If you were Maeve’s boss, would you address this issue at a team meeting: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Goldman Sachs’s trading floors are vast rooms crammed with rows of tightly packed workstations, four monitors for every trader. The two-by-two grids tower over and swallow up their users, so that the only way someone can be identified from across the room is by the decorations affixed to the tops of the screens.

At one desk, a toy vulture peers down, held in place by wire feet. A stuffed eagle in a sports jersey sits atop another monitor. Flags: Brazil, Canada, Norway. A lacrosse stick juts out like a severed head on a pike.

One Wednesday in May, Maeve DuVally walked the rows in a pair of low-heeled black leather pumps, her ankles wobbling slightly. Her pink lipstick popped against her blonde hair, dark jacket and the pearls at her neck. Her eyelashes were full and inky.

Ms. DuVally, a spokeswoman for the bank, passed the flags and the lacrosse stick. She passed the vulture and the eagle. She passed one desk where a little tented card floated at eye level, bearing the Goldman Sachs logo, a rainbow-colored rectangle and the word “Ally.”

She approached the doorway to a senior executive’s office and leaned in. Its occupant, a man in gray dress pants, looked up at her quizzically.

“Hello,” she said, and waited.

“Maeve DuVally,” she said, after a moment.

“Hello,” the man said, blinking.

“Michael DuVally,” Ms. DuVally said. “I’ve changed genders.”

“I did not recognize you!” the man said.

Ms. DuVally explained that she had not yet gotten around to telling all of her colleagues of her decision to come out as transgender. She told a story: One person she had shared the news with was a fellow member of a Goldman working group; he had replied, “Great — now we have another woman on the committee.” Ms. DuVally and the man in the office laughed at that. Then she said goodbye, and that she was looking forward to seeing him again at a meeting later that day. The man said softly, “New experiences for all of us.”

Wall Street wakes up (a bit)

Wall Street has had a hard time kicking its reputation as a dismal place for people who aren’t straight white men. Gone — mostly — are the days when investment banks would pick up strip-club tabs and female employees were harassed as a matter of course. It may be harder now to find a trader nicknamed “Porno Ray” (he worked at Bear Stearns), and the Volcker Rule has taken the swagger out of the guys who used to walk away from a day’s work with enough cash to buy a new Lamborghini — or acted like it, anyway. Despite these advances, a fleece-vested bro culture remains, and there are still plenty of obstacles to success for minorities and women.’

The group photo of Goldman’s 2010 managing director class, for example, is a sea of men with a sprinkling of women at the front. Ms. DuVally was in that class; she keeps the photo, in which her face appears above a suit and tie, on her desk. When she arrived for work as Maeve on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, only the second employee to use official channels to manage her transition at Goldman, she was testing just how tolerant and accepting a big American bank could be.

Goldman presents itself as being ahead of the curve on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. It has offered health and relocation benefits to same-sex couples since 2000. It expanded its employee medical plan to cover gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy in 2007, years ahead of JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. This year, Goldman’s former chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, received the Ally Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, a 35-year-old institution that supports the L.G.B.T. community in New York City.

Employees can choose to display posters and cards in their work areas that identify them as allies dedicated to “encouraging the use of inclusive language” and “mentoring and being a resource for L.G.B.T. people.” A giant rainbow pride flag is affixed to a window high above the equities trading desk, beside the office of R. Martin Chavez, the co-head of Goldman’s securities division and the firm’s most senior openly gay executive.

Goldman still has problems. On June 5, William Littleton, a former vice president who is gay, sued the bank for discrimination. He said his direct supervisors had failed to act when other bank employees undermined him, including when one colleague explained that he had been kept off a conference call because he sounded “too gay.” One supervisor, he said, had belittled him with comments like, “You look so Miami today.”’

There is one other Goldman employee who has formally transitioned at work (that is, involved the human resources department, changed names, made an announcement and so on): Katie Krasky, an associate on Goldman’s regulatory policy team. She was hired in February 2017, told her bosses that June of her intention to transition, and debuted her new name and pronouns that October.

Ms. Krasky said in an interview that she had not known she was a pathbreaker. She assumed there must have been other employees like her. “While I wasn’t able to find or connect with anyone who identified as transgender during that process, I felt it was probably foolish to assume I was the first, just because of the math,” she said. “It didn’t seem like it was very likely.”

A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that 0.39 percent of adults in the United States are transgender. If that proportion were applied to Goldman’s ranks, there would be as many as 140 transgender employees among the bank’s 36,000.

Goldman’s head of human resources, Dane Holmes, said Ms. DuVally and Ms. Krasky weren’t the only two transgender employees at Goldman, they’re just the only ones who have formally transitioned while at work. “There’s a lot of fluidity around how you think about sexual identity,” Mr. Holmes said. “We’ve had people who came into the firm at some different stages of their transition.”

One employee, Mr. Holmes said, had a name that befitted both a man and a woman, so she simply transitioned without any official announcement. “There are certainly people who work here who are transgender who have chosen not to self-ID,” he said. He declined to say exactly how many.

‘I never, on a conscious level, thought that there was anything I could do’

In the Goldman Sachs communications department, Ms. DuVally and her colleagues are concerned to an extreme with the stories they tell, and with what they are and are not allowed to say. Recently, while visiting the bank, I made an idle comment about Goldman’s relaxed new dress code. Ms. DuVally replied, “You can’t put this in your story, but my assistant wears jeans every day now.” Another co-worker, who has worked with Ms. DuVally for years, told me he had never seen her happier. A few hours later, he emailed to say he could not be quoted saying that.

Ms. DuVally, who has worked at Goldman for 15 years, is 58 and twice divorced, with three children. In an interview, she said that she had been unhappy for most of her life. “I drank too much in the past, and I was extremely self-critical,” she said. “In retrospect, I can say now I didn’t like the fact that I was a male.”

Before she started dressing in women’s clothing, she said, she could not remember looking at herself in the mirror and feeling anything other than disgust. “I believe from a very early age I’ve wanted to be a woman,” she said. Somehow, she added, the sense was both vague and strong. “I did not like anything that was masculine about me. But I never, on a conscious level, thought that there was anything I could do about that.”

Last year, Ms. DuVally said, she discovered that she liked wearing women’s clothing. She did so on weeknights, at her apartment on the Upper East Side. She found a support group for transgender people and made new friends.

At first, the thought of expressing herself in this way at Goldman did not cross her mind. But then, beginning late last year, she occasionally wore light makeup to work. Sometimes she would appear before her colleagues wearing bright red or pink lipstick. A few nights before Thanksgiving, she wore makeup along with a tuxedo to a black-tie event, where she mingled with other bank employees and journalists.

Ms. DuVally saw herself as living two lives throughout the fall and winter. One, where her new friends knew her as Maeve, was exciting and filled with a happiness she had never before experienced. The second, her life at work, where she had to keep being Michael, was grinding away at her.

In December, on the mornings she went to work from yoga class, she began showing up in flowy yoga pants and boots with heels. She would ride the two elevators it took to get to her office on the 29th floor and then change into a suit. The form of Michael felt stifling. Sometimes she couldn’t even last the whole day downtown in the unnatural feeling of her men’s clothing. She’d get dressed in women’s clothes and makeup while still at work, in preparation to leave at the end of the day.

Then, in March, an invitation went out to the bank’s employees: Goldman’s L.G.B.T. network was hosting a panel on “how to be stronger allies to the transgender and gender non-conforming community.” Ms. DuVally showed up to the event, in Goldman’s auditorium, in a wig and makeup, and afterward she introduced herself to some bank employees.

Ms. DuVally found the event encouraging. One co-worker, who watched it remotely from London, took copious notes and emailed them to the communications group afterward. Everyone who attended received laminated cards explaining correct pronoun usage. Ms. DuVally realized, she said, that it was time to come out as transgender at Goldman.

The bank is a place of rigid protocols, and she knew her debut as Maeve would require weeks of preparation. After Ms. DuVally informed her bosses of her decision, a human resources specialist was assigned to handle her case. Ms. DuVally got new business cards, a new ID badge, a new email address. She got a new profile in Goldman’s internal directory, so that when she joined work discussions digitally, the meeting software would display to all participants her smiling, feminine face.

A co-worker of Ms. DuVally’s in London used her access to the bank’s employee website to change Ms. DuVally’s name in past internal articles from Michael to Maeve. The bank’s security team let her into their offices to have her new-look photograph taken at a time when no one she knew and hadn’t told about her transition would chance upon her.

Ms. DuVally and her colleagues in the communications department knew her decision would be of interest to journalists, and they discussed how to keep it a secret until the last minute. In mid-May, Ms. DuVally attended a happy hour Goldman hosted for reporters at a bar overlooking New York Harbor. She was still calling herself Michael, still dressed as a man. Tucked into her jacket, out of sight for most of the evening, was a large, bubblegum-pink wallet. I noticed it when she took it out at the bar, and Ms. DuVally hurried me away from the group. Only out of earshot, and after stipulating that it was a secret, did she explain why.

In the corporate sphere, Ms. DuVally imagined that her transition would be a binary thing — that a switch would be flipped. But word was getting out. People outside her immediate circle learned of her transition plan. On May 22, when I interviewed Asahi Pompey, Goldman’s global head of corporate engagement, she gushed about the name “Maeve.” Later that day, when I told Ms. DuVally, she was surprised Ms. Pompey was aware of it.

LONG ARTICLE CONTINUES ...

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Leah Remini Doubles Down on Anti-Scientology Crusade: I Want a Federal Investigation

http://styleveryday.com/2017/08/09/leah-remini-doubles-down-on-anti-scientology-crusade-i-want-a-federal-investigation/

Leah Remini Doubles Down on Anti-Scientology Crusade: I Want a Federal Investigation

The firebrand star revs up her war in season two of A&E’s Emmy-nominated docuseries ‘Aftermath’ as she heads to New York to join Kevin James’ CBS comedy amid a church counteroffensive: “It’s been really trying.”

Some moments from Leah Remini’s childhood will never fade. Like the afternoon she rode a graffiti-covered B Train with her big sister, Nicole — at ages 8 and 10, their first time alone on New York City mass transit. Their journey took them from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to Times Square — a seedy porn-theater mecca in the late ’70s — and the Church of Scientology building on 46th Street. There, they met their mother, Vicki, a divorcee whose new boyfriend had indoctrinated the family in the self-fulfillment movement. “We went all-in, because Scientology is an all-in proposition,” says Remini. “My mother thought she’d found the answers to her life and, you know, our future.”

Three decades later, Remini is going home again. The 47-year-old actress and anti-Scientology activist is currently relocating from Los Angeles, her home since age 13, back to the East Coast. The move is a practical one: She’s joining the cast of Kevin Can Wait, part of a major second-season retooling of the CBS sitcom that sees the departure of its current female lead, Erinn Hayes. Beginning Aug. 7, Remini will be seated in a Long Island soundstage alongside Kevin James, her TV husband for nine years on The King of Queens, for the season’s first table reads. But right now, she’s just trying to cram her life into cardboard boxes. “It’s been really trying,” she offers wearily on July 28. “I’ve never been apart from my daughter for longer than five days.” Sofia, 13, has opted to remain in her current school and will travel to see her mother on weekends with her father, Remini’s husband of 14 years, singer-actor Angelo Pagan.

Remini also will continue to produce and star in Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath — the second season premieres Aug. 15. This enthralling A&E documentary series profiles ex- Scientologists like herself — people shunned and targeted by the church and, all too often, by their own family members. The two vastly different shows will air concurrently (“hopefully not on the same day,” says Remini). Aftermath has earned Remini, who stars and executive produces the show, an Emmy nomination for best informational series or special. It’s her first shot at an Emmy and, after nearly 30 years in the business, that feels good — even if it’s not quite as she had always imagined it. “When I was just acting, of course it was something you always wanted,” she says. “Like, hey, we’re on a show for nine years, you want some recognition from your peers.” Now she’s more interested to win it for her Aftermath subjects. “They don’t get paid to do the show. The only thing they get is a hate website put out on them by Scientology. They get paid internet ads against them. Their families turn against them. Any award I get is for them.”

But not long ago, before the nomination and new show, Remini had doubts that Hollywood would ever embrace her again. Her profile had waned in the post-King of Queens years, during which she appeared in a string of failed sitcoms with names like Family Tools. In 2010, she began a stint on CBS’ The Talk that culminated in her firing the next year — followed by a very public war of words with her Talk co-star Sharon Osbourne.

But her flight from Scientology in 2013 dramatically altered the course of her career — and, it turns out, revitalized it. Doubts about the organization and its strong-arm tactics had begun to creep in as early as 2004, but it was at Tom Cruise’s storybook wedding to Katie Holmes in 2006 that Remini began to seriously contemplate cutting and running. At the ceremony, set at a 15th century Italian castle, she’d innocently asked about the whereabouts of church leader David Miscavige’s absent wife, Shelly. That was apparently a big no-no, and she says church elders cursed at her and told her to mind her place. Drawn to keep asking questions, Remini soon saw her life become hell, as former friends and colleagues subjected her to blacklisting and the filing of dozens of “internal reports.”

Remini filed a missing persons report on Shelly Miscavige, whose whereabouts are still in question. A Los Angeles Police Department detective later told Remini, “She is fine,” which Remini considered an unsatisfying response. “I asked, ‘Did you see her? Did you see her body? Was somebody speaking on her behalf?’ ” (She recalls the detective replied, “Can’t tell you that, ma’am.”) Remini says the detective in question has since been hired to speak at Scientology events. “Does he work for the Church of Scientology, or is he LAPD?” she asks aloud. “Like, what’s going on here? They host detective lunches at the Celebrity Centre for the LAPD Hollywood division. I mean, they’re very, very friendly with each other.”

Remini chronicled her flight from Scientology in 2015’s book Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology — a by-turns dishy and disturbing tell-all that includes, amid the dirty laundry, a story about Cruise berating an assistant over faultily prepared cookie dough. The book was promoted heavily in the run-up to its release with a 20/20 interview and dozens of talk show appearances, and it shot to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.

With the book’s success, several ex-Scientologists reached out to Remini in gratitude and to share their own trials with the church. She brought cameras with her (and a high-ranking church defector, Mike Rinder) to document one shocking story: a woman’s deathbed account of her forced estrangement from her daughter, under church orders. Against the protestations of her management team, Remini brought that footage to producers Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman and proposed turning such narratives into a series. “I said, ‘Don’t be pussies. If you’re going to be pussies, you’re not the right producers for this,’ ” Remini recounted at a TV Academy event this past May. After a tense huddle, the two men assured her they weren’t “pussies” — and the series was born.

Remini is astonished at the impact of Aftermath‘s first season — which focused on disconnection. “We’ve heard from people who were inside Scientology, who told me, ‘I watched your show. I went on the internet. I decided to leave. I am fighting for my children after watching your show,’ ” says Remini. “We get tons of those. And it’s those moments that you go, ‘OK — we’re doing something.’ “

Season two will ramp up the attacks on the religion, shining a light on what Remini calls “all of the abusive practices of Scientology — sexual abuse and physical abuse.” Remini intends for the sophomore outing to move into an “activist” realm — meaning she hopes to present enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing to warrant a federal investigation. “I’m talking about the FBI, the police, the Department of Justice, the IRS,” she says. “If the FBI ever wanted to get anywhere, all they would need to do is do a raid. Everybody who’s ever gone to Scientology has folders, and anything you’ve ever said is contained in those folders.”

Asked to explain these “abusive practices,” Remini takes a deep breath, then lays out some foundational principles. “Scientology policy dictates that children are grown men and women in little bodies. They believe a 7-year-old girl should not shudder at being passionately kissed. That’s in Dianetics,” she says, referencing L. Ron Hubbard’s 1950 book that establishes core tenets. “If you join the Sea Org [a clergy class with a nautical heritage] as a child, your parents give you over to Scientology. Children are treated as crew. They are assets. And if a child is molested, that child and/or parent cannot go to the police, because it’s against policy. They handle it in Scientology. They will usually bring the molester in and give them spiritual ‘auditing,’ or counseling.” The victim, she continues, “gets punished for ‘pulling it in,’ which is a Scientology term that means you did something that you’re not telling the church about — and that’s why you received the abuse. The child is usually made to do some kind of amends, to make up for what happened to them.”

Remini (who says she once was falsely accused of being “Out 2D” — Scientology’s term for having premarital sex — after church officials found lace panties in her drawer) argues that “there are no victims in Scientology. Anything that happens to you in Scientology happens to you because you made it happen.”

The church has a different take on Remini and her A&E series, citing a spike in anti-Scientology hate crimes, bomb threats and death threats since Aftermath began airing. That escalation has required “drastic increases in security in many of our churches,” says Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw, who adds that since the show first aired, “there have been more than 500 incidents of vandalism, harassment and threats of violence against the church, its parishioners, staff and leadership.” Pouw cites several recent incidents, including “a woman who gushed about Leah Remini on social media [then] drove her car through the front doors and lobby of our church in Austin, Texas, coming to rest just short of a nursery where earlier children [had been] playing,” and a man who “served five months in jail and is now on parole for a credible assassination threat against the leader of the church, which he said was inspired by the ‘King of Queens lady.’ “

Adds Pouw: “Leah Remini is just an actress whose current role is starring in a scam of a show whose singular goal is to incite religious hate and violence for ratings, money and Emmy nominations.”

With both sides ramping up for a new — and, in all likelihood, much uglier — phase of this all-out war, Remini says the fight has been “rewarding, but very taxing.”

Amid such stress, working with James again takes some of the edge off. “I’m just happy to be laughing again,” she says.

The two reunited in May for a two-part Kevin Can Wait season finale in which they played rival detectives forced to team up to investigate a drug-smuggling case. After the show notched a surprise win in the ratings, it was apparent to everyone involved that the chemistry was still there. “They have a natural ESP. It’s magic,” says showrunner Rob Long, who worked with Remini on a 1993 episode of Cheers. (Long was a writer on the show; Remini played the daughter of Rhea Perlman’s Carla.)

When NBC passed on Remini’s comedy pilot (based on the 1991 Bill Murray comedy What About Bob?) in May, Kevin Can Wait producers saw a window of opportunity. Says Long, “It was a very small group of us that thought it would be fun to bring her back as a series regular. We were looking for a creative reset — a way to create a little bit more emotion.” Season two will see the action move ahead in time and Hayes’ wife killed off, leaving open the possibility of romance between James’ and Remini’s characters.

Still, Remini, who claims that she has no idea what her arc on the show will be, says she was pleasantly clueless about the opportunity. “My agent just said, ‘You’re going to be on the show.’ I said, ‘How many episodes?’ He said, ‘No — you’re going to be on the season.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God — that’s amazing!’ That was the first round of excitement. And then, of course, reality sets in, where you’re like, ‘Oh, wait — I have to move my whole life there.’ “

Yet Remini isn’t complaining. “When I was younger, I was like, ‘What’s the character’s name? And I need to speak to the stylist on the show. And I need to have certain shoes and, like, what’s my dressing room look like?’ ” she says. “Now I’m like, ‘Great. Where do I sign?’ “

Remini will have shot three episodes when, in September, it’s back to L.A. for the Emmys, where her status as Scientology Public Enemy No. 1 could make things a little awkward for her. What if, for example, she were to cross paths with Elisabeth Moss, a nominee for outstanding lead actress in a drama series for The Handmaid’s Tale — and a lifelong member of the church?

“Elisabeth Moss believes that she can’t talk to me,” says Remini. “There’s a thing in Scientology called ‘acceptable truth.’ It means you only say what’s acceptable to the public. But she believes that I’m an antisocial personality — because I’ve spoken out against Scientology. So she isn’t allowed to talk to me. And me knowing that, I wouldn’t put her in the awkward position.”

But what if, say, the two were to suddenly come face-to-face at the Governors Ball, each carrying a freshly engraved Emmy? Would she congratulate her fellow winner? “I would, of course,” says Remini. “I don’t hold anything against Elisabeth Moss other than she’s continuing to support a group that is abusive and destroying families.”

But, Remini adds, “That’s for her to learn — just as I needed to learn it.”

This story first appeared in the Aug. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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