#who does ensemble tv like this nowadays

[ww2yaoi]

one of the best band of brothers scenes and I'm not fuckin joking

[be-the-glenn-to-my-maggie]

I was bored and started thinking about pets and here's the thing: I like dogs just as much as the next person, but hear me out when I say that the Sullies are hands-down a cat family and through years of volunteering at their local cat rescue and fostering kittens each Sully (+ ensemble) has their own puffball serotonin angel.

Snowflake. Snowflake is Tuk's cat—and, funnily enough, one of the oldest of the Sully's cats at 11 years. Nobody knows why she chose to name him Snowflake when they adopted him, he isn't even white (he's gray). Despite his age he loves playing with toys and is also very chill when Tuk dresses him up to play any number of make-believe games.

Batman & Robin. Named during Lo'ak's superhero phase, Batman and Robin are his cats. It didn't really start out that way, at first they were just foster kittens, but as time went on Lo'ak got so attached that Jake caved and let him keep them. Batman is a black and white tomcat and Robin is an orange tabby, and amusingly enough they hate pretty much everyone but Lo'ak—or at least Robin does. Batman is a bit more flexible and has been known to sleep in Neteyam's room from time to time, which really pisses Lo'ak off when he and Neteyam are in a fight.

Naia. Naia is Kiri's cat and came to them from an abusive previous owner. She's very quiet and rotates between Kiri's room and the outside. Nobody can recall a time she's ever set paw in any of the other rooms in the house besides Kiri's. Kiri always leaves her window open so that Naia can roam freely. Naia doesn't really like to be touched, even by Kiri, which the girl understands. Even so, Naia is very loving in other ways, sleeping on the pillow next to Kiri or following Kiri around the neighborhood as if keeping an eye on her.

Mittens. Neteyam's cat and the sweetest creature you will ever have the pleasure of meeting. She loves cuddling more than anything in the whole world and will do so with just about anyone. Unlike Batman, Robin, and Naia (Snowflake could care less either way), she loves strangers and is most definitely the first cat to approach when you first enter the Sully household. She's also very vocal, meowing and purring and yowling. She has a reaction for everything.

Seze. Neytiri, unlike the rest of her family, is a dog person. Neytiri does not like cats. If she had it her way their household would be filled to the brim with doggos. At first she was very resistant to the idea of having her own cat, too. Seze was a something she cold never have anticipated. She was originally brought in as an emergency foster kitten with her two littermates, and of course Neytiri left it to Jake at the time. But as their conditions got worse and they had to be hospitalized, Neytiri bonded with Seze, who became the only one of her litter to survive and recover. Nowadays her and Seze are a package deal and can be seen in the kitchen together while Neytiri cooks. Neytiri may not be a cat person, but she is a Seze person.

Bob. Jake's therapy cat and his one true joy in life (after his kids of course). He got Bob fresh out of the military and has had him ever since. Bob is dopey as hell but the whole family loves him, and he's the oldest of the cats. He and Jake watch the tv together, Jake complaining jokingly about whatever is on and Bob enjoying his pats.

Watermelon, Pickles, & Pumpkin. Spider is the only one with three cats in the family and all of them are menaces to society. From Watermelon the escape artist to Pickles the climber to Pumpkin the kleptomaniac, these cats are the bane of pretty much all of the adults' existences while the kids find them to be hilarious. No matter where you are, Watermelon will find a way to get to it. No matter how high it is, Pickles will climb it and will leap off of it, most likely breaking something in the process—or sometimes just not getting down from it for days at a time. No matter how well you hide it, Pumpkin will find it and steal it and put it somewhere you will never be able to find. Ever. And the worst part? They never do it around Spider, so he's literally in so much denial over it lmao. Neytiri is convinced they're demons while Spider is over here like "I am appalled by these accusations".

Olly. Norm's cat that has the weird habit of disappearing for weeks and then all of a sudden showing up out of nowhere. Like, Jake will stop by Norm's place and just see Olly and be all like "dude I thought he was dead" and Norm will be like "oh yeah nah".

Jasmine. Tsireya's cat and the most spoiled feline ever. Tsireya takes precious time grooming her and maintaining her specific food and water diet and adhering to her exercise schedule, and all for competitions (both show and courses for agility, etc.). Tsireya is the only one to have a purebred showcat amongst them all and both she and Jasmine take their winning streak seriously. They're not intense about it, but it is something they've worked for and are finally being rewarded for after a few years in the ring.

Pearl. Ao'nung's cat, supposedly. And I say supposedly because this cat loves Rotxo more than life itself and goes out of her way to be with him at all hours of the day. Ao'nung claims it's only because Rotxo spoils Pearl with treats and food on a regular basis, but Rotxo thinks he should just admit that his cat is their cat.

Oreo. Ronal and Tonowari's shared cat. Like Neytiri, Tonowari is a dog person, but Oreo has a special place in his heart. They're surfing buddies and hit the waves together during the summer months, while Ronal takes great pleasure in experimenting with homemade cat treat/food recipes with Neytiri. Oreo is a picky eater and working out which recipes he'll enjoy is a fun hobby of hers. Oreo also loves the water and gets so excited when he sees Tonowari with their surfing gear.

THIS IS SO ADORABLE. Nothing makes me smile more then when you guys send me these long headcanons, sometimes I have to add paragraph after paragraph and sometimes I'm like you did it, Joe, I'm just along for the ride.

I gotta argue with you on the cat family thing, the Sully family are a family of outdoorsman. They are camping and fishing and swimming and hiking and rock climbing and doing everything active and outside, and they need pets that can tag along. I am voting for dogs. I'm also arguing against Kiri letting her cat go outside. Kiri cares about the environment AND the cats enough to let any of the family let any of their cats out to wreck havoc on local species and get themselves hurt. Kiri is the type of bitch to judge the shit out of you for having an outdoor cat.

That being said, I'll kill a man for Spider's three fucking cats. Icons all around. Also tell my why I teared up at Bob being a sweet old cat 🥺 please, Bob is young and VITAL and he will live for decades more!!

[msclaritea]

Masters of the Air Is Emblematic of Our Changed TV Landscape

By Sean Fennell | January 29, 2024 | 11:45am

By all appearances Masters of the Air closely follows the path laid down by its predecessors. All three series are based on nonfiction novels and first person accounts, aiming, it would seem, to remove the glossy, melodramatic sheen of some of Hollywood’s previous depictions of war—this one pulling from Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany. Spielberg and Hanks are, once again, involved this time around, as are their production companies, Playtone and Amblin. Structurally, Masters of the Air follows the pattern laid out by Band of Brothers and The Pacific: beginning each episode with a dramatic intro set to its sweeping score before transitioning to stories broadly framed around specific missions enacted by our heroes. As you might have guessed, recreating the horrid, chaotic theater of war is no small undertaking. According to reports, each of the three series’ also have a budget eclipsing $200 million, making them all huge bets by their creators.

And yet, this might be the most illustrative in talking about what sets these series apart. It might sound obvious, but $200 million in 2001 and 2024 are two very different things and help illustrate how almost every single thing about what we call television has changed since 2001. As mentioned, Band of Brothers was an absolutely massive undertaking, a war epic stretched from a single feature film to something five times that size, and the most expensive miniseries of all time upon its release. This was unlike anything HBO had ever done and probably would not have gotten off the ground without the help of Hanks and Speilberg, perhaps the most powerful actor and director of the moment. That investment certainly paid off, with its first episode bringing in over 10 million viewers and becoming a genuine sensation...

These changes are reflected on the screen as well, where the fundamentals of what TV is expected to be has changed just as drastically as the budget. For all the money poured into Band of Brothers, it is not a star-driven enterprise. Aside from a splashy bit of casting that found David Schwimmer playing the unlikable drill sergeant Herbet Sobel, Band of Brothers is a pure ensemble drama. There are faces you might recognize—Damian Lewis, Ron Livingston, Donnie Wahlberg—but they are far from the selling point of the series. This largely reflected TV as a whole in 2001, a place where you made your name in hopes of moving on to bigger and better things. Nowadays, TV is not the stepping stone but the pedestal, and that is evident from the first minutes of Masters of the Air.

Austin Butler, Callum Turner, and Barry Keoghan are some of the brightest young stars in Hollywood and they are placed, for better or worse, at the center of Masters of the Air. One of the common complaints around Band of Brothers when it first premiered was how the nature of the battle scenes often led to confusion around who was who, the swirl of chaos as disorienting for the viewer as the soldiers on the ground. This is not the case with Masters of the Air, and not just because we move the action from the battlefield to the cockpit. We know right away who our heroes are this time around. Turner’s Major Egan, Butler’s Major Cleven, and Keoghan’s Lt. Biddick are so magnetic and given such distinct focus as to be unmissable even in their quietest moments. Listen, having stars like these is never going to be to a show’s detriment, but it does have a way of driving the viewer experience and the way the story is told, in a manner that can’t be ignored, ultimately setting it apart from its predecessors..."

Want to know why Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg actually made Masters of The Air? It's a Hunk Fest...for SOMEBODY. Nice of Paste Magazine to take note of the difference in focus between Masters Of The Air and the former blockbuster, Band Of Brothers. It's to showcase certain actors, including Austin Butler Ncuti Gatwa and Barry Keoghan AGAIN. But at least Slate Magazine admits that this entire project is for Lavender eye candy.

"If you’re into slowly paced war dramas, then you should already be amped over this release. But Masters of the Air is not just for the history buffs—it is also a treat for anyone with eyes. I’m not just talking about the cinematography, though it is stunning: What I mean is that the casting directors clearly took a page from Band of Brothers’ and Top Gun’s well-thumbed books and searched far and wide for some of the industry’s hunkiest rising stars to portray these servicemen.

The series is so chock-full of strapping young men with slicked-back hair that it’s almost distracting. Never fear, we’re here to break it down for you.

As Slate’s resident expert in all things Austin Butler and swoon-worthy thespians, I present: a guide to Masters of the Air’s many aviators-sporting studs.."

[somejack]

Twister (1996) is a time capsule from the early days of diversity in STEM

That’s right, it’s another Twister post, I’m sure my mutuals must love me. I mentioned in my first Twister post that the movie, for as excellent a film as it is, has a serious lack of representation. This is objectively true. 

For one, this movie only barely passes the Bechdel test: a rudimentary test for whether or not a movie has meaningful women characters with a shockingly high failure rate. There are multiple women in this movie, and some of them even have names - the four are Jo, Melissa, Aunt Meg, and Patty Haynes (she sings Oklahoma in the beginning chase scene). There are only three brief scenes where any of these characters talk about something other than Bill, with Melissa and Jo having a short exchange about the Dorothy system, Melissa thanking Aunt Meg in a charmingly awkward scene that arguably has a lot of subtext about how Meg feels about Jo and Bill, and Jo telling Meg to go to the hospital. Aside from that, every time a woman talks to a woman it is about Bill.

Now we get to the constant killer of movies made before 2000: race. From my recollection, there is a single black person in this movie. We see him briefly on Aunt Meg’s TV when the protagonists are rolling out to chase their third tornado of the day. I could go on, but its easier to say he’s an extra.

What does this mean for Twister?

Well, nothing bad if that’s what you were worrying about. It’s always worrying to see a purely white ensemble cast in any American movie, but that’s a modern perspective. Nowadays it is unrealistic for there to be one person of color between two teams of scientists and storm chasers (totaling around 20 people). But if you look back to the 1990s, that’s almost exactly what you would expect. The thing is, that statistic hasn’t even changed all that much, with about the same share of degrees accounting for a group that makes up 13% of the American population.

The story with women is far different though, and puts in perspective that maybe Twister was a little man heavy. In environmental life sciences (a generalization that includes meteorology), women made up about a third of the workforce at the time the movie was released, and they now occupy almost a whole half of the jobs in the field. So maybe we should have seen more than just Jo and Patty as the only women in Oklahoma willing to chase a tornado for science :/

So what do we do now that we have all of this information and context? There’s nothing to do really, save for think conscientiously when you enjoy your favorite tornado-action-flick about how the world looked back then and how it looks now. Think about how while it looks like it’s terribly whitewashed, it’s actually terrifyingly accurate and points to a larger systemic problem. 

How would I make Twister more diverse if I were making it today? The funny thing about a movie as ensemble-heavy as this is that the endlessly wonderful cast of storm chasers can be anyone. They don’t have a complicated narrative driven by experiences as black, Asian, or Hispanic Americans, so you could change anyone and hold the story constant. But is that the right thing to do? Usually, no. Diversity for the sake of diversity oftentimes isn’t meaningful. So it wouldn’t be wise to just make Beltzer a woman of color and call it a day, but it would be wise to give her interactions and scenes that show, even in the background like many of the ensemble’s scenes are, the experiences of a scientist of color.

“Twister isn’t political” well neither is race or gender. Not every meaningful scene has to be a woman defending her intelligence as at the bear minimum equal to a man’s, not does it have to be a person of color facing off with law enforcement or belligerent racists. It can be cultural, it can be nuanced. As a white man it’s absolutely not my place to make a movie more diverse or to say what should be included, so at the end of the day it’s best to take example and inspiration from the modern films that are doing just that: being casually inclusive like we should have been all along. 

This went a little off the rails so I guess,,,

tl;dr - Twister (1996) disproportionately represents men in STEM over women, and accurately shows the racial disparity in science that has been persistent in America between the 1990s and now (not to mention, ya know, every point before that). If it were to be more accurate it would need more meaningful representation of women and people of color, and I am not the person who decides how that gets done.

[aion-rsa]

Batman: Soul of the Dragon – Bringing a Little Bruce Lee to Bruce Wayne’s World

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains Batman: Soul of the Dragon spoilers.

The latest DC animated film Batman: Soul of the Dragon is a complete reimagining of the Dark Knight. It’s an out-of-continuity story, the kind of tale DC usually places under its Elseworlds banner. Set in the 1970s, Soul of the Dragon places Batman (David Giuntoli) as part of an ensemble of heroes, a collection of the top martial arts masters in the DC universe including Richard Dragon (Mark Dacascos), Lady Shiva (Kelly Hu), Ben Turner a.k.a. Bronze Tiger (Michael Jai White), and O-Sensei (James Hong). 

“It’s a weird movie in that you can literally take the voice cast and transpose it into live-action and they can make the same movie,” gushes writer Jeremy Abrams, “They’re all accomplished and good looking. It all works!”

Batman: Soul of the Dragon is a mash-up of Batman and ‘70s Kung Fu films. For this film, the comics character Richard Dragon is reinvented as a thinly disguised homage to Bruce Lee. 

“I pitch a lot of martial art DC comic ideas,” confesses Abrams. “I’ve been pitching Batman meets Enter the Dragon for a while, and evidently, [Executive Producer] Bruce Timm had a similar idea.” Timm said he’d love to do a 1970s Batman martial arts thing, which led him to Abrams. “Bruce wanted to add on a Big Trouble in Little China element, which is like catnip for me. That’s one of my favorite movies. So, it ended up being like four hours just talking about stuff, and what would work, and what would be cool.”

Abrams and Timm have a great love of ’70s cinema. It’s an unusually fruitful period to set a Batman story according to Abrams. 

“One of the great things that they had is all these really distinct genres,” Abrams says. “You had blaxploitation, you had Kung Fu movies, you had James Bond movies. Then you had horror movies that were the satanic panic type cult movies. And our movie is in the center of that and it just all seemed to lend itself to this movie.”

In the 1970s Batman comics strove to distance themselves from Adam West’s campy TV rendition which had become the dominant impression of the character since its wild success from 1966-69. Part of this reinvention involved scaling down Batman’s reliance on gadgets and technology in favor of a more two-fisted, detective style approach. Batman: Soul of the Dragon explores Batman in his formative years, and scales back his resources accordingly. “You’re not going to get the Batcave,” explains Abrams. “You’re going to get the loft above a building, a dance club.” 

There are so many Batman stories already so to stand out, the filmmakers sought to bring Batman to his roots by making this more about Bruce Wayne.

“We’ve tried to humanize Batman,” adds director Sam Liu, “so he’s not in the costume for the majority of the film, and it’s more of a human story.”

There’s always risk when retooling a beloved character. 

“We get to work on big, A-list superheroes,” Liu says. “These are iconic heroes. They’re not just made up from cartoons and stuff like that. It’s a big responsibility sometimes, but if I spend too much time thinking what it means to so many people, I could get intimidated. After a while…you kind of want to try something different. We’ve done so many Batman stories. Sometimes you try something new and it’s interesting to you, because again, it’s different. But then the fans don’t get on board with it because they kind of want them to stay the same.”

Who is the Best Martial Artist in the DC Universe?

Given the formative theme, Batman: Soul of the Dragon illuminates Batman’s training in martial arts. However, this isn’t exactly Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins either. Batman doesn’t study ninjutsu with Ra’s al Ghul. Instead, he trains under O-Sensei alongside the most powerful martial artists of DC. Abrams, a consummate comics and martial arts geek, already had his top three DC Universe martial artists picked out. 

“Well, I know Shiva’s in there. I know Richard Dragon’s in there, and I know that Ben Turner’s in there,” Abrams says. “I definitely think they are the top. I don’t think Batman breaks the top five in terms of DC martial artists. But he’s cool. I just think he supplements martial arts with so many other things.”

Even though Batman has top billing, he’s not the main character. According to Liu, each of the others in the quartet of heroes could carry their own story. 

“We didn’t want any of them to be sidekicks,” Liu says. “We’re so used to these Batman stories where Batman is the guy. It was a very conscious decision in building this, that we made sure that Richard was never a sidekick. If anything, this was a little bit subversively kind of supposed to be more of a Richard story. Batman is just one of the characters. He grew up with these characters, and he’s just part of this ensemble, and each of them have their part in this grander story.”

In the wake of Bruce Lee, Kung Fu oriented characters spread into comics. Marvel’s upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, based on a popular comic series that came out in the 1970s, is a leading example, however DC had their own stable of martial masters. 

“I know and I love the glut of DC martial arts characters of that era,” states Abrams emphatically. “Everybody has their peculiarities in the things they love about fandom. I know a guy that is really obsessed with the background creatures of Star Wars. But one of my obsessions in the DC universe are these really cool well-defined martial arts characters they have.” 

Batman: Soul of the Dragon takes a deep dive into several secondary DC martial artists like Judomaster Rip Jagger (Chris Cox), Edmund Dorrence (Patrick Seitz) and the nefarious Kobra Cult including Jeffery Burr (Josh Keaton), and Lady Eve (Grey Griffin). What is it about cobras and martial arts villains nowadays?  

Enter Richard Dragon

While all of the martial artists in this film have been reinvented to some degree from the comic pages to this animated adaptation, the biggest change is Richard Dragon. In the comics, Dragon was originally Richard Drakunovski, a Caucasian character. In later story arcs, Dragon’s title is usurped by his villainous student, Richard Diaz Jr. In Batman: Soul of the Dragon, Dragon is Chinese, a clone of Bruce Lee’s character ‘Lee’ from Enter the Dragon. 

“‘Race swapping’ is not usually where I go first because I’d rather just make a new character,” confesses Abrams. “But we made this an Elseworlds, so there’s a lot to be set up. We can do whatever we want.”

For Liu, bringing a positive Chinese character to the DC animated universe was huge.

“It’s funny because when we started this film, they sort of approached me saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to put you in this sort of ’70s Enter the Dragon meets Batman kind of a story.’ I was like, ‘Oh boy. This could go either way.’” 

Liu remembers laying out the ground rules in an early writer’s room meeting by saying “Look, I’m Chinese. I just want to make sure that you’re going to do this respectfully, because I don’t really want to be a part of something if it’s just sort of…irresponsible.”

Liu was reassured to learn that respectful representation was at the forefront of everyone’s mind from the very beginning and that sold him on the project. 

“I’m an older guy, so I’ve experienced racism and all that kind of stuff, because I grew up in the South when I was very, very young,” Liu says. “It’s horrible. I’ve always liked to get more representation.” 

For Liu, Batman: Soul of the Dragon is another step towards increased acceptance of diversity. As an Asian American, he has experienced xenophobia all his life. 

“As volatile as it is nowadays, it’s much better,” Liu says. “I remember my dad being an Asian man in the South, and some of the stuff we had to go through. I come from an era where you’re oppressed, so you’re just expected to be that way. Any little movement forward is a big step. For me, personally, I think it’s great.”

As the world’s first global Asian celebrity, Lee was a pioneer before long before diversity became an issue of debate. He lived by example, all the while infusing his philosophy into his constant battle against racism.

“It’s like a theme that’s in Enter The Dragon, the art of fighting without fighting.” In Batman: Soul of the Dragon, there’s even an homage to the scene in Enter The Dragon where Lee drops that line on Parsons (Peter Archer) and tricks him out of a fight. 

For Abrams, shifting Richard Dragon to Asian was true to the roots of the character. Dragon first appeared in a paperback novel written by Denny O’Neil under a pseudonym. According to Abrams, “On that cover, it looks like Richard Dragon is an Asian man. And for Bruce [Timm], that’s how he always saw him.” Abrams feels that bringing Dragon back to how he was depicted on that original cover was the way to go. “I think it adds a great diversity and it pulls away from, ‘Oh, here’s another white guy with Batman.’ It makes this really cool ensemble, even more definitively different.”

The Launch of a New Franchise?

The finale of Batman: Soul of the Dragon leaves the door wide open for a sequel. Batman, Dragon, Shiva, and Turner enter another hellish dimension, and what lies ahead is anyone’s guess.

“The ending is actually one of the first things that we came up with,” reveals Abrams. “We looked at each other and thought, ‘This is crazy. But, what if this happens?’ We’re looking around at each other, like, ‘Somebody’s going to stop us, right?’ It’s like, ��Nope. We’re going to do it.’ The ending fits perfectly with the dream of Batman, which is, ‘I get to fight evil, forever.’”

So will there be a Batman: Return of the Dragon? 

“Bruce Timm had talked about potentially doing more if this does really well,” adds Liu. “I think he’s in talks with some other creators and stuff like that, because he’s such a fan of the ’70s that I think that he would love to be able to continue doing more stories, especially in this genre. This story is really, really personal as far as just all the things that he loves. I think both him and Jeremy are in love with this era and this genre.”

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Batman: Soul of the Dragon is available now on Digital and Blu-ray.

The post Batman: Soul of the Dragon – Bringing a Little Bruce Lee to Bruce Wayne’s World appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[furederiko]

"Shin Sakura Taisen Rekidai Kayoushuu" Review (Part 2)

SEGA boldly (or is it a risky move?) introduces new Kagekidans that represent new cities with this game. Not one or two, but just THREE for now, with a fourth one debuting later in the Spring TV series. Track 4 to 6 of the album are specifically slotted for these new heroines...

Contrary to reports in various sites that had reported them as such, in my opinion, these are definitely NOT character image songs. Kouhei Tanaka-sensei has openly referenced them as "[City Name] GEKITEI". So these sit in line with Paris Kagekidan's "Mihata no Moto ni" and New York Kagekidan's "Chijou no Senshi". Whatever happens to those teams, by the way? Hmmm...

One might argue that unlike "Shin GEKITEI", only one member sings these songs. But they seem to forget one thing: Sakura Shinguuji sang solo on the first vanilla version of that song. I don't know what the future holds, but there's a possibility that in the sequel(s), we might get another take of these songs that incorporate other members of their teams. For two of them, at least. We'll just have to wait and see. For now, let's embark on a globetrotting journey!

Niji no Kanata (Other Side of the Rainbow) by. Huang Yui (Sumire Uesaka)

As soon as I heard the full version, I wasn't completely sure how I felt about it. Surprisingly, I think I enjoyed the short MV version better. When SEGA started releasing one MV after another, starting from Berlin to this one, "Shanghai GEKITEI" totally stole my attention. I proudly declared it as my favorite of the three. Perhaps because the verses felt more concise (with less instrumental parts) that made it sound more... kickass? Even though it had a somewhat odd lyric, which you will understand why. This full-length version somehow exuded a different vibe. The verses were longer, which was the bit that I'm not too fond of. On the other hand, the lyrics flowed better and made more sense. And then there's an issue with Yui's voice. She had a playful and childlike tone in "Aratanaru". Assuming that's her who got the shortest line in the interlude, of course. I prefer the more gallant take that she used here, but the inconsistency threw me off. Suffice to say, I had to hear it a few times to finally get the hang of it. But goodness gracious, the Chinese vibe, which was even stronger (that should be obvious, I know! Ahaha), never failed to win me over. Just like the verses, the instrumental portions were also longer, thus giving it a slower and elegant pace. That serenading sound of Erhu just hit my soft spot every single time, likely resonating with some part of my genes. Combined that with a blast of modern instruments, and it blew me away. I sure want to see a live orchestra perform this with a Chinese theatre dance to accompany it! Its lyrics, courtesy of Ouji Hiroi, carried a similar message of Teito, Paris, and New York themes. Protect the city, its people, and seize the dream. Why does the title use 'Rainbow', though? Especially considering 7, while being a good number for a relationship, is considered as unlucky in Mandarin (ghost month). The key is in the kanji for 'Rainbow', because it is also known as 'Hong' or 'Jiang', the name of a two-headed dragon in Chinese mythology. And what does the symbol of Shanghai Kagekidan look like? Yep, a DRAGON! So while in Japanese it literally translates as "Other Side of the Rainbow", the context also points to it being "Other Side of the Dragon". Even though it might take me a while to get used to this, and it's no longer my number one, it's an amazing piece nonetheless. I'm old, so I'm not familiar with Sumire Uesaka's pop songs. But so far, I haven't heard her sang a song like this. As Kouhei-sensei had stated, these new "GEKITEI" were composed to challenge the VAs vocal prowess. That seems to be the case here, to which Uesaka did a great job! PS: Wikipedia told me that Uesaka is a fan of Russia. I wonder how she would feel if she was cast as a leader of the Moscow Kagekidan instead?

Entaku no Kishi (Knights of the Round Table) by. Lancelot (Manami Numakura)

Just like the previous song, I had a completely opposite reaction to this as well. It honestly took a while for me to like or even understand the London Kagekidan theme when its official MV first came out. This full anthem also sounds different but in a far more positive light! How so? The second Westminster Bells kicked off, my mouth grinned so wide. Then the music slowly developed into that familiar tone, but continued to build up even more with meticulous touches and flares of fanfare, horns, trumpets, and an electrifying mix of the electric guitar. And suddenly I was transported into the medieval era, with images of brave knights flashing on my mind, en route for a battle to protect the land. Daaaang... Kouhei-sensei totally knows how to make something sound so graceful, yet gallant and rich, huh?! A sensation that young'uns nowadays would easily call 'EPIC'. My lingering issue with this song remains as-is: Manami Numakura's voice. Don't get me wrong, she is a wonderful VA with a unique vocal tone (Kohaku in "Dr. STONE", right?). I'm just not a fan of her singing voice, never was since her Idolmaster days. Even when it's my least favorite part of the song, that tomboy-ish charm blends perfectly with the song and gives it a distinct sound. The end result is something that continues to delight me and puts a smile on my face. Oh, what about the title, you ask? I think it's obvious enough. London Kagekidan is clearly based on the tales of King Arthur. Arthur is (likely, the code-name of) its blond-haired, high priest-dressed Captain, while our female lead here is the loyal Lancelot. It intrigued me when the lyrics, by Shouko Fujibayashi, mentioned 12 knights just like its lore. Does the team really have that many members? Assuming it will feature in the sequel, that would be fun to see. Then again, Idolmaster started out with 10(+1) idols, so I'm sure Lancelot would fit along just fine! Hahahaha... PS: Do you think that echoing bell at the intro and interlude sound convincing? Well, Kouhei-sensei said they actually recorded it at the actual location! Another good reason to appreciate this song.

Kurogane no Hoshi (Iron Star) by. Elise (Nana Mizuki)

*standing ovation* This. This IS a SCARY song! And by scary, I mean what a challenge it IS to pull off. Imagine trying to do at least an okay job at this in a karaoke booth? Godspeed. Nuh-uh, I don't think this song will work without Nana Mizuki's powerful vocals. Not just because I'm a fan of her, or have always wanted her to be part of this franchise. But I love Elise because she adds that much-needed heavier tone to the cast. Her brief but scene-stealing lines in "Aratanaru" proved that notion. You could easily recognize her voice amidst the chorus. If you think the short MV version (the actual first 1:20 minutes) that you see above already sounds amazing, just wait till you hear the middle part of this song. It slowed down, with various strings gently swayed you to enter another realm. Then it went FULL OPERA, with a piercing vocal work that would send nothing but genuine shivers to your soul! Goosebumps. All the time. The music had clear influences of Wagner's compositions, and those who are at least aware of classical music (or have seen "ClassicaLoid Season 2" Hahaha) would probably notice that almost immediately. Song of Valkyrie, anyone? Because of that, Kouhei-sensei personally did the arrangement for this number, seeing that it required a full-blown orchestra ensemble. Sensei showed the first part of the music sheets during one of the Teigeki Report, and I had a feeling it must've blown away everyone who saw it. I mean, Seijuurou Kamiyama's VA Youhei Azakami was literally jaw-dropped. He also revealed that Nana went above and beyond on that last high note, hitting it longer than she was supposed to, in time for the grand orchestra finish. Seriously, goosebumps. It is certainly one of the highlights of the album, and you DEFINITELY need to listen to this. Also, this is the only Kagekidan theme that I'm not sure can work as a group song. It IS still a Berlin Kagekidan song, proclaiming the might and power of the team that started it all. But can it be performed by a team of Hoshigumi? Dealing with that complicated lyrics by Shouko Fujibayashi ("...Schwarzer Stern, kurogane no hoshi..."), and fast-paced tempo will undoubtedly leave them breathless. Now I'm patiently counting the days to see Nana perform this in a live concert! Mindblown... PS: By the way, original Hanagumi's "Dream/Yume no 1 Pound" and Kanadegumi's "Enbukyoku, Kimi ni" came to mind when I tried to analyze this song. Presumably due to that middle part, which is true to Kouhei-sensei's style. You'll be hearing that magic touch of him again in some of the next tracks.

Next: the curtain rises for the Shin Hanagumi ladies!

Video is available on SEGA Official Youtube Channel. "Shin Sakura Taisen" is produced by SEGA, and RED Entertainment. Credits and copyrights belong to their respective owners.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael in the Mainstream: Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel is one of the MCU’s most powerful characters right now, one of the few heroes who can even have a hope of defeating Thanos, so of course she needs to have a movie. Throwing in a bunch of heroes into an ensemble film without properly setting them up is what amateurs do, and at this point Marvel is no amateur; they know how to properly set up heroes… kind of. You see, Marvel Studios has a bit of a problem when it comes to origin films: they’re all very, very similar, very formulaic, and sometimes even predictable. That’s not to say they’re bad, far from it! Films like Black Panther, Ant-Man, and Doctor Strange are all rather formulaic but they all have interesting twists to the formula that makes them feel fun and exciting. Marvel is a lot better with quirkier fare, ensemble movies, and sequels than they are with solo origin films, Iron Man notwithstanding, but they usually find a way to make things feel fresh.

Captain Marvel… does and doesn’t achieve this. Captain Marvel is probably the most “Marvel” Marvel movie yet made; it feels like a film they would have released a decade ago, during Phase 1 or Phase 2. And there is actually a good reason for that; this movie has been in the plannig stages for a long, long time, but racist, sexist, cheapskate CEO Ike Perlmutter wouldn’t let this film be made because he didn’t think non-white, non-male leads could sell (a laughable sentiment when looking at superhero films nowadays), only relenting to let the film be made if Kevin Feige made an Inhumans movie, which fell through when Feige managed to get rid of the meddler and get him exiled to the Marvel TV department. This film has been a long time coming, and it feels like it.

But I can’t say the film is bad; it’s most definitely not, and there’s a lot to love in the film. At the same time though, it’s easy to see why someone might not find themselves sucked into this; it’s a film coming out in Phase 3 that feels like it belongs in Phase 1. Where it would have been one of the best Marvel films of the early phases, it struggles a bit to stand out in the current MCU where the past few films have been nothing but home runs, and competing superhero cinematic universes have also been producing quality films, with Spider-Verse and Aquaman in particular bringing a lot of new stuff to the table. It just feels like Captain Marvel is almost irrelevat in the current landscape aside from introducing Carol Danvers to the MCU.

And yet… this is still a good, fun movie, because it delivers exactly what it promises, and it does the one thing I consider the saving grace of any film that would otherwise be average: it is wholly, unabashedly cheesy.

So let’s talk about what I loved first. The Skrulls are easily the very best part of the film, particularly Talos. Talos is one of the most interesting and complex antagonists in the MCU so far, and there’s a lot more to him than it initially seems. Just the fact that in general the Skrulls are now part of the MCU is absolutely delightful, as it seemed for so long they’d be exiled from continnuity due to Fox owning the rights to the most famous Skrull, Super-Skrull, due to his close ties to the Fantastic Four (though this is no longer a problem). To say much more about what makes the Skrulls so great would be to spoil one of the few genuinely good twists the movie has to offer, but it is a pretty neat twist on what you’d expect from Skrulls.

Carol herself, as played by Brie Larson, is a mostly enjoyable character. I think Carol is a bit shaky right now, having to deal with the tired amnesia plot and not getting to use her powers all that much, but for the most part she’s an enjoyable hero. I think she’ll fare a lot better in ensemble films and sequels, because Larson does a really good job, it’s just that so much of the movie is spent with her being limited. However, this is mitigated by the fact that she has great chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson, and pretty much every scene with Fury and Carol interacting is amazing. Speaking of Jackson, the effects used to de-age him are nothing short of stunning; you can’t even tell its CGI, it’s that good. Far better than the de-aging effects used in films like Rogue One, that’s for sure

The soundtrack is pretty good, though sometimes it’s a bit too on-the-nose. The usage of “Come As Your Are” is so literal it hurts, and the usage of “Just a Girl” is so utterly cheesy. But I think stuff like this helps add to the film’s charm, as does the fact that this movie is honestly, genuinely funny, especially due to the aforementioned banter between Carol and Fury, as well as the presence of Goose the cat, who Fury dotes over and who plays quite an amusing and cool role in the film, shockingly enough. Goose might be one of the best characters in the film honestly, which is not often something you hear about a pet cat.

Of course, not everything is perfect. A lot of the action is nauseatingly shaky and weirdly poorly choreographed, with the exception of the final battle and perhaps Carol’s escape from the Skrulls near the start. For a superhero movie, having such wonky action is inexcusable, though thankfully there’s not too much fighting… or not thankfully, since again, this is a superhero film, the sort of film where you expect superhero action. It’s not all bad, but when it gets bad it gets really bad.

There’s also the underutilization of characters. You know how the return of Ronan and Coulson was hyped up? Well, unfortunately for everyone, both of their screentimes are incredibly limited to the point they are essentially cameos, though Ronan feels like a cameo moreso than Coulson. Korath, too, is a bit wasted, though he at least gets a little more prominence with him being part of Carol’s initial squad, though he’s still not exactly focused on to any great extent. It just feels so pointless to have these actors come back to these roles if they’re essentially playing meaningless bit parts, especially in the case of Korath and Ronan, seeing as we know they end up dying anyway. It just seems like a huge missed opportunity to do something with these characters.

And of course, the whole amnesia plot kind of holds things back. Not that it’s done poorly, but it is a tired trope that is tricky to pull off, and considering Carol’s amnesia holds back the plot and holds her back from using her powers to any great extent, it does feel like more of a burden than anything that leads to interesting developments. It doesn’t help that most of the stuff revealed over the course of her rediscovering who she is is stuff that you could easily figure out on your own from nothing more than promotional material and the obvious hints throughout the film; it just feels like a contrivance to keep Carol in a weakened, vulnerable state instead of letting her let loose. Say what you will about Superman movies, but he at least gets to be Superman for vast swaths of the film in his origin story movies. Here, Carol’s big Captain Marvel moments really only come at the end, though I can’t stress enough that the  final battle is a pretty cool sequence.

Still, nothing in this movie is done excessively poorly; there’s nothing here as bad as the Iron Man sequels or Thor: The Dark World. On the other hand though, there’s nothing here as innovative or impressive as in Thor: Ragnarok, Infinity War, Black Panther, or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, with the exception of the Skrulls. There’s a lot of good elements here, obviously, but most of the stuff really just doesn’t elevate this movie to greatness; it’s merely a good, even very good film, but not as great as it should be nor as bad as some make it out to be. And this isn’t entirely the film’s fault; as I said, Perlmutter’s meddling did keep this on the backburner for a long, long time, so it’s frankly amazing the film is any good at all.

Really, whether you love or hate this is going to boil down to how much you can tolerate cheesiness. I live and breathe cheesiness, I have been exposed to cheese since I was young, so of course I’m pretty fond of this film. I’m also a huge fan of Skrulls so it’s a given I’d like a film with them in it. But if you don’t like this film, if you just don’t connect, well, it’s hard to blame you. It’s not an amazing or groundbreaking film, and really that’s a shame, because it could have and should have been. But on the other hand, not every film needs to exist to break new ground, not every film needs to change the world… sometimes films can just exist and be good.

Captain Marvel is a film that has attracted a lot of controversy, vitriol, and debating over it, making it one of the most controversial superhero movies in recent memory. Beyond that sentence I’m not going to even bother addressing any of that, because it is all the most idiotic drivel I have seen in regards to film in years. This is an utterly harmless superhero movie through and through, and any argument otherwise is just pointless drivel.

I really wish this could have come out years ago, because this would have been a game-changer back when superhero films were first breaking through. In this day and age? It’s just a good, fun movie, nothing less. I have faith Carol’s next outings, in Endgame and her inevitable sequels, will be a lot stronger and more polished and full of interesting developments, but her first outing is simply a fun time before the inevitable heartbreak and mindblowing that Endgame promises. I’m kind of okay with that; it’s nice to have a little calm before the storm.

[justgotham]

Gotham is swiftly hurtling toward the finale of its fourth season, and the stakes are higher than ever for the good (and bad) guys of Gotham City. The great news for fans is that the show is more fun than ever; the bad news is that the show has not yet been renewed for a fifth season. Now that Fox has started renewing series, the time has come to start crossing fingers and hoping that Gotham scores another season on the airwaves. Why? Because Gotham is the best and cancelling it after four seasons would be a huge mistake.

Superheroes are all the rage on the large and small screens nowadays, and Gotham is truly unlike any other comics-based project on the market. In fact, it doesn't even feature any conventional superheroes. Rather, Gothamis an origin story for some of the most notorious and beloved characters of DC Comics fame. Since it's unconnected to the DC Extended Universe, the Arrow-verse on The CW, or any other movies or series based on DC Comics, Gotham isn't beholden to the continuity other projects. Gotham has its own Bruce Wayne and its own Jim Gordon and its own Joker...maybe. Superhero fatigue doesn't apply with a show that is so outside of the box as Gotham.

The fact that Gotham isn't connected to the DCEU or the Arrow-verse or any other DC Universe has given it the freedom to borrow from a variety of DC projects to create something truly unique. The trailer for the next couple of episodes points toward Gotham adapting elements of the notorious Killing Joke story for Bruce Wayne, and all signs point toward Gothamadapting aspects of the unforgettable "No Man's Land" comic arc. A Season 3 episode staged a scene for Selina that looked like a glorious homage to Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns.

The new Jeremiah looks like the Joker walked right off the page of a comic but his origin story on the show couldn't be more different than any Joker in any other adaptation. The show can pull aspects from other Batman stories and create entirely unique arcs that are fun for longtime DC fans and newbies alike. Thanks to Gotham's ability to go in a whole bunch of different directions with different characters, the show has produced stories that might have been ridiculous if they weren't handled so expertly. Gotham not only pulled off an evil twin scenario with the Valeska brothers, but it used the evil twin scenario to keep its promise that Jerome isn't the Joker while introducing Jeremiah as an even more dangerous Joker-esque villain.

Solomon Grundy's introduction was straight out of the pages of DC Comics, but who could have seen Penguin falling in love with Riddler, jealously killing the doppelganger of Riddler's dead ex-girlfriend, and then engaging in an elaborate back-and-forth battle for revenge? And then there was the transformation of art gallery owner Barbara Kean into a crazy Babs who received the powers of the Demon's Head! Bruce Wayne is fighting crime before he's out of his teens, just got a proto-Batmobile, and is a couple of weeks away from what looks an awful lot like the first Bat-Signal. It's impossible to guess what exactly is going to happen from week to week, and that's not something you can say about every TV show.

Gotham is also able to tackle a variety of genres and tones within episodes. It can be silly and it can be scary. It can be totally bonkers and brutal and complicated by an ensemble of characters with shifting motivations. This is a show that is never boring, especially considering a big chunk of the main characters are villains whose loyalties shift as quickly as their goals. There's mysticism, realism, and resurrections. Gotham is never dull because you never know what mood the characters are going to be in per episode, and hilarity often ensues. Viewers aren't asked to take the show entirely seriously, which makes the show an awful lot of fun.

The cast of Gotham is also fantastic. Cameron Monaghan is always dependably psychotic as the Valeska brothers, and we can be sure that nobody on television can laugh quite as maniacally as he can. Robin Lord Taylor as Penguin and Cory Michael Smith as Riddler are never more hilarious than when they're bouncing off of each other, and Drew Powell as Butch Gilzean/Solomon Grundy has gone through all manner of changes. Ben McKenzie has been a rock from the very beginning, and young David Mazouz and Camren Bicondova turned out to be great fits for their roles. Casting Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle as kids who would grow up to become Batman and Catwoman had to be tricky, given that there was no guarantee that they would fit their roles as they got older. Who could possibly argue that Gotham didn't nail it?

If all of these aren't enough reasons why Gotham needs to be renewed, we have to take into account the fact that a fifth season of Gotham would allow it to hit the 100 episode milestone. 100 episodes is a big deal for any show and could potentially lead to syndication in the future; surely Fox could let Gotham reach that milestone with a Season 5, right? Yes, the ratings aren't exactly the best on television, and Fox would undoubtedly like a bigger audience, but Gotham has so much going for it that elements beyond ratings should be taken into account.

We can only wait and see if Fox does give the renewal order for Season 5 of Gotham. Given that my only complaint about the series is that nobody has yet produced a web series of Penguin and Riddler in pseudo-marriage counseling with guest appearances from the rest of Gotham's rogues, I know I'm crossing my fingers for more Gotham. Be sure to stay tuned to CinemaBlend for the latest in Gotham news, and definitely check out Fox on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET for new episodes.

[jonathangroffcentral]

In Conversation With Mindhunter’s Jonathan Groff

Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images

Actor Jonathan Groff has already enjoyed a huge degree of respect and recognition for his previous roles in theatre (Hamilton and Spring Awakening), on TV (Looking and Glee) and also in film with the hugely successful Frozen. Lately however he has found a whole new audience, who are singing his praises for his outstanding performance as Holden Ford on Mindhunter. In my extended interview with Jonathan we talk about his early years, his first roles, working on Mindhunter, his thoughts on David Fincher’s directing technique and so much more. (x)

By Paula Courtney -  July 29, 2018

PC: So how are you?

JG: I’m doing well. I’m in Pittsburgh.

PC: I’m in Edinburgh: have you been?

JG: I’ve never been.

PC: Well you must put right that wrong.

JG: I know and there’s that famous theatre festival there.

PC: Yes and it starts in about a month; actually it’s the worst time to come to the city: it’s jam-packed then.

JG: I have friends that have been over there during that time and they loved it there.

PC: It is really good because it opens the city up much more. We are getting a lot more cosmopolitan, in that the cafés and venues are open much later.

JG: And are you liking that or is it taking away its charm?

PC: I like it because it’s similar to when you visit other parts of Europe where you can be sitting outside at a cafe at 10 p.m. – guaranteed we don’t always get the weather. Especially on a Sunday, I don’t know about America but Sundays could be quite boring when I was a kid: there was nothing open, nothing to do. So yeah, I like it where it’s going.

JG: Nice.

PC: What about yourself: what kind of town is Pittsburgh?

JG: Well Pittsburgh is interesting, kind of like what you are saying about Edinburgh: where it has been becoming more cosmopolitan, probably in the last decade or so; it’s sort of like Hipster Land now. It was a kind of big, industrial town and then it crashed and now there’s cool coffee shops and bike stores. There are actually really incredible restaurants! My friend actually has a place in New York called Caselulla, it’s on 52nd and 10th, (it opened when I was doing Spring Awakening back in 2007) and they opened a sister location in Pittsburgh. So there are people from all over the culinary world coming and taking up space there, which is interesting.

PC: In the past British food was slated for being bad but it’s turning around nowadays, which is great. Having said that some food in these fancy places I’m like, ‘What even was that?’ (Both laugh)

I always like to begin an interview talking about the person’s name. I’ve read your middle is Drew: does that have any special reasons as to why your parents chose that or did they just like it?

JG: My mom wanted my first name to be Drew after her older brother. He just passed away a couple of years ago but yes, his name was Drew. My brother’s name is David; he’s my older brother. I think there’s Jonathan and David in the Bible, who were very close friends, and I think my mom and dad liked the name Jonathan and they associated it with the name David because of that.

PC: You were born in Pennsylvania: what was it like growing up at the time you were aged around 8 -10 years old? What kind of boy were you at that age?

JG: Life was good. My dad trains horses for a living in Lancaster PA. We didn’t live on a horse farm – our house was separate from the horse farm – but in the summer I spent a lot of time with my brother and our friends running around this kind of giant, grassy field on our farm. There was a corn crib there – a giant structure you put corn cobs in after you get them out of the field – that was always empty over the summer and we would climb and play in that. There were lots of little barns we would play in and horse stalls. The first play I ever did was when I was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz in my dad’s barn: we sold tickets to our parents; we have video footage of people coming to the show. It was very kind of creative and ‘country’.

PC: Is that because you had to make your own fun, because you didn’t have access to museums, art galleries etc?

JG: Yes definitely. I mean, once we got a Nintendo in the late ‘80s that definitely took up a lot of time as well. For better or for worse my brother and I spent a lot of time on the Nintendo, but my mom and dad were very athletic and cool, and they really liked the outdoors, so my mom was always trying to get us out of the house and get us playing outside – took us on bike rides. We were outside a lot: for which I’m really grateful. I feel grateful that there really was a nice situation for us growing up because there was this horse farm, but there were fences all around it, so it wasn’t like we were just in the middle of nowhere. Our parents were always up on the top of the hill and we would go acres away and play: so it was a great balance of having independence, but not really. We could go off on our own but our parents were always aware of where we were, they didn’t always have their eye on us but it was a nice balance.

My mom grew up in a small town called Strasburg in Pennsylvania where she’d climb out of her back window and run through the streets and play. She tells all these stories about meeting her friends at the pool – just stuff you would never do now because it would be so dangerous for kids to roam the streets at 5, 6 & 7 but she grew up in a town where there was this level of freedom and independence that would just be impossible today, because now it’s way more populated.

PC: And also because people now often say they don’t even know who their next door neighbour is. In those days, where I grew up in England, it was really rough and there were some very unsavoury people but on the flip side there were more good people than bad, who looked out for each other and their families, so we could play out all day. Certainly where I live now we know our neighbours but I’ve heard lots of people say they don’t know theirs. When you have kids it is a fine balance: it can be a big bad world out there never mind what we see on Mindhunter…

JG: Yes.

PC: Did you have a nickname in school?

JG: I did not. I used to hate it in elementary school when people called me Jonny; I don’t know why I didn’t like that nickname.

PC: I suppose it would be just like Groffy or something, if you can add a ‘y’ to a name people do tend to do that.

JG: Yes, I have way more people now call me J Groffy, they call me JG, so I have lots of nicknames now but I didn’t have any in high school. In middle school which is 7-8th grade here (you know 10-12 years old) I was very obsessed with being cool and having the right clothes and going to school dances and hanging out with the ‘cool’ kids. I was very obsessed with the social ladder at age 11 & 12. And then, once I did the 8th grade play – which I guess I was maybe 12 or 13 at that time – I just found my love for theatre and then I didn’t care at all where I fit in the social scene.

PC: Really? Because you do look like the type who was in with the ‘cool’ kids.

JG: All of that kind of need and headspace that was taken up thinking of trying to be cool or whatever, was gone almost in a blink of an eye. As soon as I did the play it was like ‘boof’ and it was gone – all I cared about was theatre. Then there are these two great theatres in my hometown: one is called the Fulton Opera House, which is a regional theatre where they would have actors from New York come down and perform in the plays; and then there’s another theatre called the Ephrata Performing Arts Center, which is a community theatre which would hire local actors. So once I was 13-14-15-16-17-18 I spent all my free time after school working at those theatres, whether that was playing parts or being in ensembles in the musicals or working with as backstage crew. I just became obsessed with theatre and acting and then that’s all I did, all I could be about, throughout high school. I had friends in high school and I would do the high school plays and stuff but I spent all of my social time at these theatres – I had a handful of friends at high school that I connected with but I wasn’t quite as involved – I was always thinking about theatre outside of school.

PC: You were always going to be an actor it seems, weren’t you?

JG: Yeah I thought I wanted to be an actor when I was in the barn playing Dorothy at 4 or 5 years old but then, once that 8th grade play happened, and I started meeting people in the community that were from New York who made their lives being actors, that’s when I really became keen on the idea of pursuing that.

PC: What was it that drew you? I mean: are you sort of the sort of person that likes to be in the spotlight, did you like the confidence it gave you or the closeness you feel with people when you are in a play? I was an amateur stagehand at one point and there was always a feeling of being lost after a play run finished.

JG: For me, the desire to act always comes from a place of play, imagination and daydreaming and play, and all of that is really where that joy comes from, and it just has really always turned me on. You know everybody acts for different reasons: people act from a place of pain, expression – a sort of exorcism of that – but for me it’s always come from a very joyful place and a sort of place of imagination. I think there was a part of me… you know I was not out of the closet when I was in high school and I wasn’t living fully a gay life until I was 19 – that was the first time I was ever with anyone sexually and then I didn’t come out of the closet until I was 23 – so I also think there was an element of escapism in acting that probably helped me express myself when I was sort of not expressing myself, in retrospect. I think that was there definitely an element of it but even now (even with Mindhunter) I so enjoy playing ‘pretend’.

PC: I have spoken to a lot of actors who have said that acting is an escape for them: whether that’s from a terrible childhood or whose parents have said, ‘Acting is the last thing we want you to do.’

JG: My parents actually – when I was thinking of going to college and wanting to major in theatre – they encouraged me to not major in theatre, but to move to New York instead and just pursue acting. They said, ‘You know you love it and you have so much experience in community theatre and whatever, why not just go to New York instead of paying 40 thousand dollars to train in acting?’

PC: Yes. I interviewed an actor who has been in a couple of Quentin Tarantino productions and Quentin Tarantino said the same thing to him, ‘Don’t bother going to acting classes, just act wherever that may be and watch two films everyday.’ That worked out great for him.

JG: For me experience has always been the best learning tool and if you are lucky enough to be able to get experience… I’ve always learnt on the job, that’s always been the best way for me. Jumping in and trying it, and getting to work with different people and different directors and different actors and different musicians – and taking stuff from all of those experiences.

My parents, even though they are not at all in the arts, somehow instinctually knew that, aside from the fact they didn’t want to help me pay for college, (laughs) they really supported me: they knew it’s what I loved. My dad trains and races horses for a living and my mom was a physical education teacher, they centralised on things they were really passionate about. So when I said I wanted to be an actor – even though they didn’t know a lot about acting, the passion that I felt for that – I think they recognised that so they were very supportive in my pursuit of that as a career.

PC: It’s like what Holt [McCallany] said in his interview with me. Obviously his parents were in the business, but he said when he and his brother got to university level his mother said, ‘I will pay for you to study anywhere you want.’ She was that supportive – and of course he ended up in France. Amazing to have that kind of support.

JG: Yes it’s amazing! Holt and I have that in common actually. He was very close with his mother. It’s so funny because we often talk about how we spend all this time in Pittsburgh, when we are acting in Mindhunter, talking to these serial killers. One of the many consistent qualities is that they have all have troubled relationships with – mostly – their mothers, and how he and I have had just the opposite experience.

PC: Yes I know with Holt he couldn’t have been more loved, by the sounds of it. You wonder: would they have turned out differently had they had that love and support? I don’t know how much you have researched serial killers, but does that just apply to men, or is that a factor in female serial killers too?

JG: That’s a great question, most serial killers are men (at least the ones on Mindhunter are) I don’t [know] to be honest if female serial killers have a troubling relationship with their parents. We talk a lot about nature v nurture (that sort of age-old question) how someone naturally dotes when they’re young and then it’s their environment that cultivates the bad behaviour: is it more one than the other? I think it’s still a question people are still trying to answer and it’s one that we explore a lot on the show.

PC: I suppose if the show runs and runs eventually, if not this coming season, it will feature a female serial killer.

PC: So you said earlier about your parents being very into physical education: was there any pressure to do sports? And with your dad: he didn’t expect you or your brother to follow him into the horse business? What does your brother do?

JG: My brother runs a company in Lancaster PA: he is a businessman. We are very different from my parents. My dad actually comes from a long line of dairy farmers: he is the oldest brother of his family and he was meant to take over at the dairy farm; it would have been the appropriate next step for him. He was not passionate about dairy farming and he was not passionate about cows (was not a fan of cows) – cows are incredibly hard work and you have to be really into it. He didn’t want to do that so he found another avenue, through family friends, and discovered a passion for horses. He would not have wanted to demand that my brother and I go into the horse business because he was sort of permitted that freedom, as the oldest son, to get out and to do his own thing. He would have loved it if we were in the horse business. I’m sure that would have been amazing for him to have that happen – it would have been a great experience and a bonding experience for us – but it doesn’t always add up that way. We became close in a different way. He’s still racing the horses. And my mom: the great thing about her being a physical education teacher for my brother and I was, even though we didn’t go into teaching or Phys Ed in any way, she instilled in us passion for exercise and running; we were doing races when we were in elementary school, in 4th grade we were doing the three-mile run or whatever and when we were on vacation. She instilled in us that love of being active. She will be 64 in the Fall and she looks so young because she took care of herself and she exercises.

My brother, even though he is a businessman, gets up every morning and works out. Certainly, as an actor – for example on a show like Mindhunter – you get issued with your costumes at the beginning of the season, then we have 10 months of shooting and I can’t get fat! (Laughs) On the set there’s always food going around and I wake up every morning, religiously, and exercise, and that’s partially because it’s great therapy and it’s great to stay in shape, keep my mind clear or whatever and that’s a lot to do with the fact my mom gave me that habit when I was a kid.

Photo:: Ken Regan/©Focus Features

PC: What about horses? Did you get to ride any? Are you an accomplished horse rider or were they purely for breeding?

JG: No! Well my dad does harness racing so he’s not on their back, he’s behind them. So I’m sure if we had shown any interest at all, my brother and I, I’m sure that he would have gotten a horse we could have ridden around and that would have been really fun. But my mom kind of instilled in us a fear of being around the horses because, in those times that we were playing around on our own, she didn’t want us to go near the horses and get kicked. So we grew up with sort of this fear of horses, funnily enough, and then occasionally on Saturdays we’d have to shovel the horse poo out of the stall – just everything about the horses as a kid was what we would eye roll about. So we were never really around them.

The first time I had to ride a horse was for a movie I did called Taking Woodstock: which was my first film that I shot in 2008. It was directed by Ang Lee and the final shot of the film was me riding up this hill on a horse at sunrise. So I took some horseback riding lessons for a couple of months and I invited my dad to the set on the day that we shot the scene where I rode the horse up the hill and so it was this very proud moment, ‘Look Dad! I know how to ride a horse!’ I’m 33 now but I did get on a horse eventually and he was there to see me do it, which was a special moment.

PC: I’ve been on a horse a couple of times but it was really scary especially when they lower their heads to eat grass, it’s so scary.

JG: Oh totally and they feel your fear. I find them very skittish and very sensitive and you jerk the wrong way and they flip. Each horse has a different personality but as a whole they are very sensitive so the minute you are scared in front of them they are basically all over it, so trying to get ‘Zen’ and breathe…

PC: Are you a sucker for musicals, or theatre in general? In your free time would you go see a straight play or do you think musicals are so much better?

JG: Good question. I mean my heart is always in musicals, because that’s what I started [out] doing, but I was just in New York this week (I had a couple of days off so I went there) [and] I chose to see two straight plays. I love theatre in general. I’m a junkie – a total theatre junkie – pretty much anytime, anywhere, I love live theatre in any form. For me when a musical is great there’s nothing better. To successfully put a musical on and all the elements come together – the choreography, direction, music, orchestra and all of that – it’s just a miracle that a musical ever works (there are so many different elements to it) so when that is all kind of ‘cracking’ and it all comes together, there is nothing more exciting to me than that. I don’t discriminate: I love all live theatre.

PC: What was it like doing the voice-over for the character Kristoff for Frozen? How does that differ from other mediums, since you wouldn’t necessarily feel connected to the other actors like you would in a film or show where you are side by side? I assume they record the voice over segments separately?

JG: The big revelation for me was that doing a Disney film is the same as re-enacting a Disney film when you are a kid in your bedroom, because you are just totally alone in a padded room (‘now you’re in an ice storm’ so you have to pretend ‘Anna’) using your imagination; so it’s harking back to the days of me being in a room alone acting out Peter Pan or Mary Poppins.

PC: I’d never thought of it like that but yes you are right.

JG: I never met any of the other actors: well I’d met them but I never worked with other actors. I didn’t see them throughout the whole process until we were sitting there watching the first screening of the movie together. They cut it all together and that was very surreal to see how… You are really, as a voice actor in those animated films, a small piece of a big picture. There is so much work and so much effort goes into it and how it comes together is really just phenomenal. They videotape you while recording and then try to match your mouth with what the character does, and it’s pretty amazing.

PC: Did you cry when you watched the first screening?

JG: I think I did cry.

PC: You would have to be hard-hearted not to!

JG: My mom and I will still watch. I mean it’s been years (and now we are recording the second one) it still has not sunk in fully yet that I’m in a Disney animated film – very surreal.

PC: What about the technology they use in The Avengers for Ultron? Where they have sensors on the actor’s costume. That would be cool on Frozen.

JG: Motion capture you mean. They don’t use that on Frozen: they have a little video camera in the recording studio, so the animators can sort of reference if there is a gesture or something while you are making a vocal sound. They match the gesture, like if they are saying ‘Wow what was he doing there” they can reference it visually, but they also use their own faces as well. It’s just fascinating to watch the process. We had a session with the animators about where you breathe from and where you sing – what’s happening in your mouth when you’re singing as opposed to talking – to help them animate the singing part.

PC: Returning to family stuff: I read somewhere you have roots in England, Scotland and Germany. I have been burnt before where I’ve referenced something and it turns out there is no truth to it… so have you?

JG: No! Maybe I’m just not aware of it. (Laughs) Years ago we did one of those genetic test things with my family and I think we were West German; I think that’s where most of our DNA was from; I would have to go back and look at it.

PC: How has it changed for you in everyday life since Mindhunter blew up? Can you still ride the subway? Can you still go your doctor’s surgery and go shopping without wearing false glasses, nose and moustache?

JG: It hasn’t changed at all, not even a little bit. Yesterday I was in a coffee shop in Pittsburgh and the girl was saying, ‘Are you in Mindhunter?’ I have a very sort of ordinary white boy look and I don’t really have distinctive features that stand out in a crowd, so it’s great.

PC: I suppose, say someone like Johnny Depp, you might recognise straight away.

JG: Right. When I was in high school and I came to New York I saw Kristen Chenoweth. She is a famous musical theatre actress and she’s [done] some TV stuff – she is barely 5ft tall, blonde, just like this petite, little blonde girl, when she walks around she looks like she has a spotlight on her, just the way that she looks. I remember seeing her in Times Square, I went, ‘Oh my God! That’s Kristen Chenoweth!’ and went over to her and spoke to her and got her autograph. I don’t have that quality.

PC: I’ve asked that question before and other actors have said there are just so many famous people wandering around New York at any given time that it’s not the same like if you came to Edinburgh, you would be swamped. One actor told me he saw Bruce Springsteen in Manhattan and he was being a complete fan boy about him but he didn’t stop him and ask for his autograph even though he was dying to. Maybe people just leave you alone.

JG: Yeah, maybe.

PC: I always like to ask what life lessons has a person taken from their parents or grandparents. When the time comes, hopefully years and years away, when you look back and say, ‘Oh I remember this about my dad or this is why I’m this kind of person.’ You are obviously a nice person, a gentleman: has that rubbed off on you from your parents?

JG: The biggest thing would probably be discipline and the appreciation and sort of joy that you get from working hard: both my grandparents worked really hard; my parents worked really hard. When I was at that formative age 9-14, I would mow my grandmother’s lawn and I’d worked for my dad on his horse farm – they were always forcing us to do stuff we didn’t want to do. We were sort of like ‘ugh’ through all of those years when you are going through puberty and being forced to do manual labour. Then coming out of the other end of it and understanding the value of it and the sort of joy that you get from working hard and, when it’s over, feeling pride in what you achieved and looking forward to doing it again. That’s something my parents have that I know they took effort to instil into my brother, and I don’t know if that quality comes naturally or not in people, but it was definitely kind of forced upon us. Now it might show itself as being as simple as learning all your lines before you come to set, or being really prepared for an audition: just having that respect for yourself and respect for the people who you are working with so are prepared in doing the work. Doing the ‘math homework’ version of your job is something that my parents instilled in me when I was a kid, that I take with me. I remember my mom always saying, ‘It’s important to always make a good first impression.’ I remember ‘Have respect for people who are older than you’ was a golden rule – we talked a lot about that when I was a kid. But the biggest thing was probably the value of working hard.

PC: That is probably reflected in the fact that you didn’t want to go to university or whatever and just wanted to get in there, hands on, get your hands dirty and do the work.

JG: Yes, they instilled in me that desire to learn and work. From an early age I was such a sponge. Once I got to high school age, and was meeting those people from New York who were working in my hometown, I was just asking questions, then I was going to New York in my senior year of high school and then I finally moved to New York when I was 19 – taking classes and waiting tables. Getting the understanding: you get out what you put in; if you work really hard and put a lot in, that work takes you somewhere. Sometimes it doesn’t always take you where you expect it to go but it definitely helps.

I just read this really great book called The Creative Habit, by the choreographer Twyla Tharp, and she talks about her creative process and other people’s creative processes – other famous artists and how they do their work. She just really drives home the point that, no matter how lucky and brilliant someone is initially (and perhaps there is an artist who at one point, you know, just got lucky, they basically sneezed and became famous through something), she talked about if you want to have a long career, anyone that is considered an expert or quote ‘genius’ – brilliant at what they do – nine times out of ten they have a very intense work ethic and they work really hard at what they do. It’s a myth that some people are just brilliant and can do whatever they want. When you look at all the people who have had success, a lot of it is hard work, and I feel grateful that my parents have instilled that quality into me at a young age.

PC: Holt said about you, in his interview with me, that you always turned up on set with your lines learned – that was one of the things he admired about you.

JG: Well he’s the same way. I will never forget when we rehearsed our first scene (the first scene we shot together) it was where we were teaching at road school and we were talking. He was talking about motives and stuff and for the first rehearsal we were both off-book. We were set up ready to play and I’d never really met him before – I’d met his mom, we were familiar. But we got there and I went, ‘Wow! Okay, cool. This is going to be fun.’ You never know what your co-stars are going to be like, and he showed up and it was very clear we both had a similar kind of desire to do well. We wanted to come in and we wanted it to be good and we showed up ready to play and we just had so much fun the first season, because we both had this deep desire to do a good job, and to be there for each other, and to make something great. We wanted to fulfil David’s [Fincher] vision: we both have immense respect for him and what he does, and we just wanted to do well together.

PC: It’s a mutual respect you and Holt have. I asked him how he would describe you and he told me you were so ‘infectious’, as in: ‘Always happy, eager to work and a pleasure to work with from day one,’ those were his words. I asked him, if I ever spoke to you, how would you describe him? He replied, ‘Ah, you know, the grumpy one, the guy who arrives on set at 5 a.m. grumpy until I’ve had coffee.’

JG: That’s so not true! We are a very interesting pair because we are very opposite in many ways and sort of like it is in a show, sort of like an ‘Odd Couple’ dynamic between the two of us. But at the same time he makes everybody laugh.

PC: I love his deep, hearty laugh.

JG: Yes, he has that quality I don’t have where he’s always the life of the party, everybody shows up and he’s always telling jokes. He’s always like shooting the shit with the guys on the crew, making everybody laugh and smile. He’s just got this jovial, infectious energy that is just so specifically Holt – honestly I don’t know anybody else who has the energy that he has.

PC: He is so passionate as well when he speaks, you can hear it in his voice.

JG: Totally, totally and he’s incredibly intelligent.

PC: Yes he is, it is like when I watched the interview where he is speaking away in French and you are looking at him in wonder, like: ‘Where the hell did you learn to speak like that?’

JG: Oh my gosh that was a trip! We did this press tour. He’d talked about how he’d gone to school in Paris, he had a flat in Paris… He’d talked about all, but it had never occurred to me that he speaks fluent French! So we were in Paris on this press tour and all of a sudden he whips out this French – I was like: what?

PC: It is written all over your face.

JG: He just is endlessly fascinating and is constantly surprising.

PC: Some French people have told me he actually speaks the language very well, not some pigeon French.

JG: Yes! That’s what we were asking the Netflix people that were based in Paris, that were French – they were saying yes. They were like, ‘You do have an American accent but you speak the language so well.’ He’s just such a character that guy.

PC: I have such a soft spot for him. He goes out of his way to help people. He’s just lovely!

JG: He’s such an old school gentleman – they don’t make them like that anymore. He’s just got class. He would say this and credit it to his mom. She was Midwestern and very well-mannered; she had impeccable manners. She was very humble and very gracious, always thought about other people first. We don’t have that as much anymore: it’s very old-school. He’s like a guy from another time in a lot of ways. His nature and his manners are just very special.

PC: He is so nice with his fans too.

JG: His mom became a famous cabaret singer and she had very personal interaction with her fans. That’s part of the beautiful quality about him.

PC: Is Holt going to be your forever friend?

JG: Oh absolutely! Absolutely! We’ve gone to see a bunch of plays together in New York; we went to Shakespeare in the Park last summer.

PC: Yes, he was saying, ‘I will get Jonathan over when I go to London. He will drag me to all the plays and musicals. We will just spend the whole weekend at the West End.’

JG: Yes. When we were on the press tour in London, we went to go see a play. That surprises me because Holt doesn’t seem… I mean, even on Mindhunter, in the past he’s done all these action movies, he’s played a lot of cops, he’s played boxers, he plays a lot of meat-heads and so you wouldn’t guess that he’s very cultured, loves cabaret, friends with the writers of Kiss me Kate for example.

PC: Holt knows everyone like Liam Neeson and Clint Eastwood.

JG: I would kind of expect him to know those guys – that makes sense to me because those guys are action type actors, that to me I can understand but, for example, when we went to the memorial service for his mother, he knows Steven Brinberg, who is a cabaret artist famous for doing a Barbra Streisand impression. I was like, ‘How do you know Steven Brinberg?’ It’s just hilarious that he’s very close friends with him. When you know Holt’s body of work in action films you just wouldn’t put those two together.

PC: Yes I watched Holt on the Jimmy Fallon show he was teaching Fallon some boxing moves and he was very ‘New York’ Manhattan-like, very different to how he is. It’s that whole different perception of him, to what comes out of his mouth especially when he speaks French. Most actors I’ve spoken to have been lovely, but there is just something about Holt that is special. Actually all of the Mindhunter cast – and I don’t know if it’s coincidence or if it’s particularly driven that way but – (those we have dealt with so far) I think are really special. They are really supportive of each other. We have remained friends with a core group of them. I don’t know if these people were especially handpicked by David or the casting people with that element of being young and ambitious and kind. I have seen this once before that was in cast and crew members on NBC’s The Blacklist but it’s rare.

JG: Well I think David doesn’t have time for bullshit. He’s not going to waste time. He’s all about the work. He’s all about finding the best way to tell the story and has a hard-working discipline and I think partially intentionally (but maybe subconsciously) finds people that want to work. Not to have this thing lead into the next thing but to have them go work on specifically that job. Which sounds like obviously something everyone would do but. like you said, generally it’s not. I think David, whether it’s intentional or not, ends up surrounding himself with people that are there to work. In the case of Mindhunter, you’re right: it is a very special group of people and that’s partially just that simple fact that everyone is there because they want [to be there], they’re showing up to work and trying to make something that’s really good.

PC: Yes, and they are very supportive of each other’s work too, like when Cotter Smith and Jack Erdie did a play in Pittsburgh together recently, both David and Holt turned up to watch it.

JG: Totally.

PC: Tell me more about working with David Fincher. Obviously his name is on everyone’s lips nowadays and we know his style of directing – we all know he may shoot the same scene 70 times – but there’s much more to him than that. I always like to get information first hand, if I can. What kind of impression has he made on you?

JG: Well it’s just the whole idea, for me at least, [of] having complete faith and trust in someone and knowing that they are going to take you somewhere that is interesting, and working with him is different to working with anyone else. One of the reasons being that you go, ‘Okay, I will just do whatever you want,’ because I so believe in him and in his brain and in his vision, and his point of view, because he’s just proven time and time and time and time again – with all of his films and projects – that he’s one of the most interesting, creative people working today. So just to get the opportunity to be a part of his world is exciting and especially with this TV experience, particularly right now, in this very moment, it’s the first time he’s ever come back to a television show. He directed the first two episodes of House of Cards and he was Creative and Executive Producer on that show, but he never came back to direct it again. He very much had his hand in every episode on the first season of Mindhunter. We weren’t sure if he would come back and do the second season or not, because he has never done that before and now here he is, and we are working on the second season. Just to get that extended time with him and to see how… I guess the thing that is so inspirational about him is that he doesn’t sit back and go, ‘Okay, we know what we are doing. We know who these characters are. Let’s just continue comfortably down the road we were going down before.’

We came back to the second season and obviously some of the sets are the same, and we actually basically know who the characters are, where before we didn’t know what the show was yet – we were still making it. So there’s that element, which is great. But it’s still the same process as it was the first time around: it’s not laid back and comfortable; it’s not pressing the same notes; he’s really trying to move things forward and make things different, evolve it and grow it and change it as it goes along – that’s just an artist that is always searching, always changing and always asking the questions. He’s just always trying to get to a better version of the truth: in the writing, then in the shooting and in the editing, he just never stops working and never stops asking questions, and it’s just so rare to find someone like that.

PC: So how does it work that David Fincher directed the first two episodes and the last two: what happens in-between when he hands the reins over to another director but is obviously still on set?

JG: There’s a bit of a balance: you know he lets them do their thing and they are of course directing in the context of the world he created, so he can’t just hand it over.

PC: It’s not total control for them, he’s leading it?

JG: Yes, he’s set up the vocabulary of the show and the vocabulary of the shot and how the show is made, so they are allowed a certain amount of creative freedom, but in David’s world. In the first season he would occasionally come on set and help us stage certain scenes or certain shots in the morning, then he would leave and let us figure it out from there, or he would let the director set up their shot then give them notes later. He was literally in Pittsburgh for the entire year so his presence was there regardless of if he was on set or not. But then in rehearsals and stuff – because one of the other things about the show is we get a lot of rehearsals, we get to read through all the scenes with the writers before we shoot them – he’s there for all of those.

So we are always talking about the intention of the scene and what the intention will be on the day. He said this great thing on the first season that I’ve really stuck with: that when the writer is asking, ‘Why do we have to bang out every specific word of the scene before we start shooting?’ David talked about how, when you show up on set the crew gets the sides, the actors get the sides, the extras get the sides – everybody gets a copy of the sides – and everyone will have a different interpretation of what these sides mean and how the scene is going to look, so you want the scene to be as specific as possible once it gets into the hands of all those people. So that there is this innate direction of where the scene is going by the specificity of every word, of every line; and really taking the time to craft that out – so everyone getting their hands on those on the day, on set, is very important. Even just the attention to detail in that regard, in the writing and in the rehearsing, affects how the guest directors will then come on and direct the scenes because we spent so much time rehearsing specifically – exactly – what every line, and every word, is intended to express.

PC: Can you say to David Fincher, or the writers, ‘I don’t like this line,’ or, ‘This line isn’t something I feel Ford would say.’ A lot of writers are very precious about their work (and of course you wouldn’t do it just because you could) but would you be able to challenge a line and make a suggestion about what would fit better or is that totally off-limits?

JG: My sort of personal thing is to sit back and let it happen, let the evolution of the writing take its course without me saying… As an actor I find you think, ‘Oh I don’t know if I would say it like that?’ And then you start saying it ‘like that’ and it ends up being a great surprise; ‘I wouldn’t have thought I could sing like that but now this is actually adding a dimension I wasn’t aware of.’ So my tactics, certainly in this Mindhunter experience, is to let the writers write – and just because David is so involved and has the whole thing mapped out in his head, I’m pretty quiet during that part of the process. I just take the tack of: I’m just here to try and make whatever they give me work. That’s my own personal philosophy.

PC: I guess you’d have to struggle with yourself to imagine doing it better than the vision Fincher has in his head.

JG: It’s kind of going back to that thing of working with different people and being inside of different processes. I’ve done shows where they would say ‘Action’ and we would improv for about a minute into the scene and then we would get into the vibe of the scene and then improv out of the scene – and that was really fun, and stuff would come out that was really unexpected and great, and that they would use sometime in the edit or whatever. This process is the complete opposite of that – absolutely no improvisation – everything is planned within an inch of its life and like you said: when you are in the room with a brain like David Fincher’s, I’m just going to let him take the reins. For me at least that’s part of the joy of this process – being submissive to his brain.

PC: I hate asking questions you will have already been asked a 100 times or more but: how did you get the role, basically? I have read how it happened but I like to hear it from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

JG: I met David when I auditioned for The Social Network in 2008 and didn’t get it. Then I was doing Hamilton on Broadway and they sent me six or seven scenes (which are just pages of dialogue) and I put myself on tape in New York on a Monday or Tuesday, and then they responded immediately and had me put myself on tape again on Thursday, and then I flew myself to New York that Monday (it all happened in about a week) and sat with him in his office.

PC: What was that like? Obviously you had met him before but you must have been blown away thinking, ‘I could be the lead on a show that David Fincher is doing!’ Do you have to pinch yourself or do you feel you have earned it?

JG: It’s a total dream. I honestly didn’t believe that it was going to happen because it was too good to be true. Even when we were in rehearsals in LA, I really would go home and think, ‘I’m certain it’s not going to work out,’ and then we are shooting it and I’m thinking, ‘It’s still not…’ I was so excited about it. I just didn’t believe it was real until it came out, actually. It really wasn’t until about half-way through the season of shooting it – when it was clear that it was going forward – [that] I started to go, ‘Okay, this is really happening.’ Every step up until that moment I was too excited to let myself even think that it was real.

Photo by Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock

PC: Television is such a fickle world as well: you just can’t call what’s going to be a hit and what’s not. Obviously, because it had David Fincher attached to it, there’s going to be some sort of success but it’s not guaranteed.

JG: Totally! You never know what’s going to happen.

PC: I think I read that at the end of a day’s shoot you weren’t thinking, ‘Oh my God! There are all these serial killers going about!’ That, in fact, you were raring to get your teeth into the role you played. Did the things that you found out whilst filming affect you? Like when you are at home eating dinner: did the what’s and why’s cross your mind or did you just go home and switch it off?

JG: I’m not a method actor. The minute I think about what we are talking about is real, I just don’t want to go there, because I think, ‘Wow! These are actual people who actually did these things.’

PC: Who could be living next door to you!

JG: It’s too much to even think about, so that – combined with the fact [that] in the first season I was in almost every scene – I would go home and not even have time to even think what we had just done. I would be memorizing my lines for the next day, trying to keep up and not lose myself as far as the preparation for the work goes; there’s just so much work to do, it didn’t linger with me that way. It wasn’t like I had reflective time to sit and think ‘wow these people’… I was like: ‘Okay, what are my lines for tomorrow?’ It was more about the logistics of problem solving and telling the story than it was sitting and meditating on the reality of what went down.

PC: What about when filming finished? I know some of the cast have explored serial killers further and like Holt saying he wants to interview a serial killer (he told me that he had written to one).

JG: He wanted to go and talk with David Berkowitz.

PC: Yeah and Anna Torv said she had read up a lot about it after filming finished.

JG: There is not a part of me that wants to meet David Berkowitz: just the idea of it makes me feel scared and weird – and what would I say?

PC: And what he would say? Yikes, I agree it would be really scary. It would be too real, not pretend anymore.

JG: Too real! On this show we are trying to tell the story as respectfully and accurately as possible and then I just don’t want to think about it.

PC: Everybody raves about how outstanding Cameron Britton was as Ed Kemper and rightly so: apart from him, is there anyone in particular who stood out for you or just overall whose performance was great?

JG: Good question. In my audition scenes they were with the Kemper, Brudos [Happy Anderson] and Richard Speck [Jack Erdie] and what I loved is that they were all different, and this show isn’t just serial killer of the week. You get the information from the serial killers and you get a little window into their lives, but then you also see the evolution of the FBI agents and how they get savvier and how they put things together, and the psychology of getting somebody to open up in a different way – so for the Brudos thing, the idea of the shoe. And even when Holden goes back and interviews Brudos and they talk in the third person about his killings – that I found really chilling – what a creepy, strange way. It almost makes it feel even scarier to hear him talking about it. When he’s talking to me he’s sort of deflecting, deflecting, deflecting and then how he talks in the third person – I found that really scary.

PC: When Kemper hugged Holden and you had that panic attack, I could really feel it in my chest, like, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!’ Imagine that actually happening! I’d probably just die of fright, on the spot. You just don’t know what his next move could be.

JG: Yeah it’s scary and I think that the show does that really well: where you feel a sense of safety – because you’re in this jail it feels like a contained environment and they seem so docile – and all of a sudden you realise how dangerous they are and that feeling kind of comes in and out through the course of an interview; all the interviews are that way. I love that quality of the story, it’s very complicated. It’s not like you go, ‘Oh my God!’ It’s like, ‘Okay, that seems like a normal question.’

PC: What do you think of how your character evolved from, I think you said someone who was possibly a virgin, impeccably dressed, boy next door, to how he became near the end of the season and how he will be in season 2? How he was affected by the sexual nature of the killings: in that he grew up more or his eyes were opened more?

JG: Yes, I think so – certainly there’s an element – and John Douglas (who the character is based on) talks a lot about the heaviness and the horror and the depravity and the sadness of the victims’ experience. You know he had a complete mental breakdown in dealing with the stuff on a daily basis and being so all consumed by it. There’s that aspect of the evolution of the character that I think is really interesting, and that’s reflected in the scene where his girlfriend puts on the shoe, and it’s the first time you realise that work is kind of coming home with him and he starts to lose it a little bit. And then, obviously, at the end when he runs literally into the arms of Ed Kemper and is sort of lost.

But the other kind of evolution I find really interesting in the character (maybe the most surprising) is that idea of narcissism and the idea of taking credit for creating something and I think it’s such a human, and American, and embarrassing quality of: ‘I made this. I’m taking credit for this. I started this.’ I say at one point to Wendy, in the one scene, and seeing how that sweetly intentioned, buttoned-up kid, gets a little full of himself, and watching that quality bubble to the surface of Holden I think is really surprising . That quality of narcissism coming to the surface and really loving the fact that he is such a, quote, ‘revolutionary character’ with revolutionary ideas. One of the things that David always talks about doing, that he loves, is that he’s only interested in an argument on-screen where both characters are right and Holden has that scene where he walks out and looks at the OPR [the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility] and says, ‘The only mistake I ever made was doubting myself.’ Holden is never wrong in his actions and in his ideas but the way it sort of transforms him is a very discerning and a little scary: that he’s seemingly so innocent [yet] becomes so monstrous and egotistical.

PC: It will be interesting to see where it goes and how far it will go next season.

JG: Exactly. I love playing that because it’s so rare that you get to play someone that is kind of so innocent, that takes such a journey like that by the end of the season.

PC: I was looking through some fan forums and these are some descriptions that written about you… Someone asks: ‘What do you think about Jonathan Groff?’ Someone else replies: ‘It’s impossible to list just one – he’s an incredible package, not just his body and perfect bone structure, his seductive eyes, playful and innocent. Lips that make the most adorable smile…’ Need I go on? My point is, I wanted to ask: what you see when you look in the mirror?

JG: Oh my God! What do I think when I look in the mirror?

PC: Yes, do you think, ‘Oh today I look dreadful. I have a spot’? Or do you think, ‘Yep, yep you look pretty good today son’?

JG: The latest thing is… well first of all I don’t love looking in the mirror (it’s not my favourite thing). The other day I had to look in the mirror in a scene that we were doing – and I really don’t like looking in the mirror when I’m playing Holden, because it makes me laugh. Looking in the mirror while acting just makes me feel crazy. Some actors love to watch back on the little monitor screens, like, ‘Okay let me see that back, see how it looks.’ That just makes me feel so self-conscious. I would so much just rather watch it all after it’s been cut and made up. I don’t love watching myself in the process. The main thing that I found when I looked the mirror was – because I had a couple of days off and I went to New York – I’m 33 and I’ve never had facial hair and now I’m getting a beard; I am actually able to grow facial hair. That has been the latest revelation looking in the mirror I’m like: Oh my God!! Basically I can go maybe a week and a half and have a normal person’s 5 o’clock shadow, but now it’s been a couple of days of not shaving and I’m starting to grow facial hair.

PC: Wow! You will be able to have one of those full beards that the hipsters have.

JG: Yes and I’m like: I’m officially getting older; I’m starting to grow facial hair; I’m starting to feel more like a man. (Laughs)

PC: I often get messages from people who have been grateful that someone I’ve interviewed has helped them through something by talking about their own experiences, whether it be depression, grief or something else. I know you had a scare with skin cancer and wondered if you would like to talk about that.

JG: Yes of course. Skin cancer for me was so undramatic, in that I just booked for a physical check-up and I’d never gotten my moles checked, so the doctor recommended I did. They saw a mole that looked weird and they cut it out and then they saw that it had like a melanoma cancer in it. The great thing is to get it out before it spreads, have it cut out and then there’s nothing else to it. So before it had spread, they just cut it out and now I make sure I’m wearing sunscreen every time I go in the sun and I get my moles checked once a year. I wasn’t in the hospital; I didn’t have to go through any treatment; I just have this scar on my chest from where I had it removed. It didn’t feel life-threatening or scary in any way when it happened.

PC: There is a fan debate about how you got the scar on your chest and equally the scar on your bicep: that you allegedly got from some woman’s stiletto or something. Is that true?

JG: That is true. I had a light scar… Let me see if it is still there. I had a light scar there from when I was doing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Glee and I was wearing a T-shirt and we were doing the run through. We were just rehearsing it and the stiletto scraped my arm down my bicep – it was pretty hilarious. I had a scar there definitely for a couple of weeks, then it was a light scar and now I think it’s completely gone.

PC: Shows you how dedicated your fans are that they are discussing your scars online in a forum.

JG: That’s impressive that they know so much.

PC: Your meaty thighs are another whole thread!

JG: That’s amazing!

PC: Which word do you find yourself using more than others and do you have a favourite word?

JG: I’m trying to stop saying ‘like’ and I’m trying to stop saying ‘totally’. I’ve had lots of friends in my life who say I say ‘totally’ a lot, so that’s definitely a most used word that I’m trying not to say. The other thing I’m trying not to say is: ‘That’s so interesting’. I say that a lot. And I’m trying to not go up at the end of my sentence per David Fincher: when you talk like this and you end a statement like it’s a question. I’m trying to stop doing that.

PC: You are putting a lot of pressure on yourself! Do you have a favourite word?

JG: I’d say my favourite word is ‘yes’.

PC: How would you spend your perfect day?

JG: It would depend what I’m doing at the time… You know what my perfect day is? It’s waking up, doing some form of exercise – be it yoga or spin class or going for a run. Then it would be maybe having breakfast: making it alone with the radio playing. Then hopping on my bike – this is all taking place in New York by the way. Go on a bike ride to Central Park and then meeting my friends in Central Park at Sheep’s Meadow. Eating and hanging out for a while there.

PC: What’s Sheep’s Meadow?

JG: Sheep’s Meadow is a big sort of grassy area in Central Park. Then maybe go over to a restaurant… let’s see… where would I go? I would go to some restaurant on the Upper West Side, near Central Park, and have a late afternoon lunch with my friends.

PC: I need more details: a meat, fish or cheese dish?

JG: I would go to The Smith and have steak salad and a glass of rosé then I would go back home to my apartment; I would take a nap. Then I would hop in the shower. I would get back on my bike ride up to Midtown and I would perform in a Broadway Musical. Then I would go with my cast members again to some bar afterwards – where I would have a whiskey – and then I would hop back on my bike and ride home. Perfect day!

PC: Do you ride your bike a lot to get round New York?

JG: Yes that’s how I get around. I love it. When I was there two days ago I rode my bike everywhere.

PC: That’s how people don’t recognise you because you are wearing a bike hat: do you wear a hat?

JG: Yes of course.

PC: What could you not live without?

JG: Music!

PC: That takes us nicely to the next set of questions…

What was the first record you ever bought or the first download you ever downloaded?

JG: The first I ever bought would be Brittany Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” on CD – it was great.

PC: Is there a song that takes you back to a special time in your life?

JG: I remember listening to that song “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None The Richer when I was in 8th grade doing the 8th grade play. It was in the movie She’s All That and I remember I had to kiss my friend Emily in that play and I just remember the anxiety of having to kiss her and that song being on the radio.

PC: How old were you?

JG: 12 years old.

PC: Aww… was that your first kiss? Did it all go fine?

JG: Yes it was fine.

PC: Do you have a song that you must blast out when it comes on?

JG: Pretty much anything Beyoncé, but especially “Grown Woman”.

PC: Is there a movie soundtrack that you particularly love?

JG: When I was in 2nd grade I used to obsessively listen to the soundtrack Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, with Kevin Costner.

PC: With the Bryan Adams’ song that was in the charts for months?

JG: Yeah exactly. That one.

PC: What about now: what movie soundtrack would you put on?

JG: I love David O. Russell films and I’ve always loved the music in his films so I bought the Silver Linings Playbooksoundtrack; I bought the soundtrack for Joy. I just love the music in his films so definitely one of those two.

PC: Apart from musicals, is there a specific genre you favour or do you just love music generally?

JG: I found out that at Beyoncé’s Coachella concert (which I’ve now watched about 150 times) when she has this long 5-minute intro and it starts with a drum roll, and then this sort of like New Orleans jazz music playing in the background – I learnt that the tune is from this band called The Rebirth Brass Band so I’ve been listening to a lot of their music. I’ve been listening to a lot of New Orleans Jazz. I will listen to anything though.

PC: What about live music? Do you go to many live gigs?

JG: I wish I went to more. I don’t go to a lot of live gigs and every time I go to one I always think I wish I watched more live music. That was even the case with the last one I went to, I can’t even think off the top of my head who that was. The best one was definitely going to the Formation Tour [Beyoncé].

PC: Obviously you are a wonderful dancer. Are you always up first on the dance floor – or do you take a bit of persuading?

JG: It depends on my mood. Last time I was dancing was at the opening of Frozen on Broadway and I was definitely the first person on the dance floor.

PC: So you are on a road trip with only a dog for company, not a goat and not a horse: what’s on your playlist?

JG: I would drive all the time – I love driving. Beyoncé, Frank Ocean – let me just look at my phone – Bobby Darin (I’ve been listening to a lot of his), the Black Panther album, Alesia Keyes, The Carpenters, The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed , Kendrick Lamar, Barbara Streisand, Chance the Rapper, Lolo (my friend Lauren Pritchard from Spring Awakening), Sara Bareilles, Jackson 5, Elton John, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles, Amy Winehouse and Billy Joel.

PC: What does music mean to you?

JG: It’s like the reflection of every joy, sadness, confusion. Music is like life to me: there just a reflection in absolutely everything. I love it!

[fytaem]

Taemin: the Singer Stretching the Boundaries of K-Pop

{171107} Another Man From a shy member of SHINee to a confident solo artist in his own right, this 24-year-old Korean is fearlessly blazing his own trail

The duality of Lee Taemin – a member of legendary K-Pop group SHINee, and a successful soloist – is well known to his legions of fans. His performances are intense and highly visceral experiences, heavily influenced by Michael Jackson: he sings hooky electronic pop songs like Drip Drop with a inviting, breathy urgency, while utilising cinematic instrumentals and vocals (Flame of Love) to showcase his skills as a modern dancer. In contrast to his stage persona, however, the 24-year-old is down-to-earth, sweet and sometimes shy – traits which, given that he’s been globally famous for nearly a decade, have become particularly cherished. Yet TAEMIN, as he stylises his stage name, has long seen his public image as far more multifaceted. “I feel that there’s many different sides of me,” he says. “And there’s so much more that I’d like to show, which is why I try different and new things, things that others cannot do, with each release. All of my albums are who I was at that time in my life, and MOVE closely represents who I am today.” As a long-standing artist with a rock solid fandom, Taemin does indeed have the fortune to experiment and thrusts forward with MOVE, his second solo album and a taut, bass and synth driven single of the same name. He released three videos for the latter (a main cut, an ensemble performance with female dancers, and a duo dance), all which visually stretch the clearly gendered boundaries of K-Pop. By combining male and female-centric dance moves, he blurred those long-distinct lines into one sinuous and powerfully sensual performance that disregarded gender entirely, while also challenging himself with a tighter and more primal choreography than he’s danced previously. “THERE’S SO MUCH MORE THAT I’D LIKE TO SHOW, WHICH IS WHY I TRY DIFFERENT AND NEW THINGS, THINGS THAT OTHERS CANNOT DO, WITH EACH RELEASE” – TAEMIN Influential Japanese choreographer, Koharu Sugawara, is behind this groundbreaking step away from K-Pop’s norms. Having previously worked with TAEMIN on his solo material and on the dance TV show, Hit The Stage, their formidable presence can been seen on the duo version of MOVE. “The dance flows from her emotions. When I watch her, I can instantly interpret what she’s feeling at that moment rather than admiring her choreography,” TAEMIN says. “Koharu doesn’t teach me the choreography, she tells me about it. Where I sway my hips in MOVE, she gave a long explanation: ‘I thought about how there would be girls surrounding you, and I was dancing like this because I want you to think that I’m the only guy here and I’m the best. I want you stand out even more’. I was able to understand what she wanted me to express, which cannot be delivered just by learning the choreography. She’s an amazing friend and she truly makes me want to become an artist who can express these deep emotions like she does.” Although TAEMIN, who speaks assuredly and articulately about his work, received support from those around him, what he created with MOVE didn’t come without reservations. “I was definitely worried about trying something new,” he admits. “I could have chosen a safer route and done music that’s more popular in K-Pop, but I wanted to expand its musical spectrum, to stand out from the rest, and create something that could bring out my identity more.” “I COULD HAVE CHOSEN A SAFER ROUTE AND DONE MUSIC THAT’S MORE POPULAR IN K-POP, BUT I WANTED TO EXPAND ITS MUSICAL SPECTRUM” – TAEMIN From the teenager who, by his own admission, struggled as a vocalist to the point of not singing on SHINee’s earliest record, to becoming a confident, respected and well-rounded artist, his personal growth has often felt like public property. But behind the glossy, high-achieving exterior of awards, record sales, world tours and countless interviews, TAEMIN was attempting to map out who he was more deeply, and experiencing issues of ambition and confusion familiar to everyone. “When I was 16 and 17 years old, I dreamed of becoming a perfect, a more complete artist by the time I turned 20,” TAEMIN recalls of his expectations. “However, I realised that you don’t transform into a completely new person just because you become an adult and, before I realised it, I’d already turned 20 yet still wanted to become a better artist.” Even now, as an influential and successful pop star, he spends plenty of private time considering the evolution of that public persona. “Before I fall asleep, I always think about how I could be more acknowledged as an artist, a good one,” he adds. “I think about how I could let people know more about my music and what kind of an artist I am. My head is filled with these thoughts nowadays.” “BEFORE I FALL ASLEEP, I ALWAYS THINK ABOUT HOW I COULD BE MORE ACKNOWLEDGED AS AN ARTIST, A GOOD ONE” – TAEMIN TAEMIN may already be contemplating his next step, but MOVE commands your attention in the now as an impressively complete body of work that augments the ideas, styles and emotions begun on his first solo album, Press It. Drip Drop’s natural successor is Crazy 4 U, the complex rhythms of which TAEMIN says made it “the most difficult song to record”. The acoustic Back To You is a natural stand-out, with an aching vocal that’s the result of TAEMIN recalling “every sad memory or thought possible”. “There are times when I’m emotionally overwhelmed,” he says. “Since I’m now in my mid-20s, the way I sing and express the lyrics have matured. I remember trying to figure out how to make my vocals deliver a deeper emotion as I was recording, but this song really does express that maturity, especially from my tone.” It also contains his first female duet, the light push and pull of Heart Stop with Red Velvet’s Seulgi. “We spent our trainee days together, she has very charming vocals and I thought that we should work on something like this one day,” he explains. Rise and Love on the other hand are the opulent, emotive songs he embodies so well, and Thirsty, with its creeping trap snare, pulsing bass and provocative lyrics is a statement of desire and adulthood. While some artists might feel jaded after nearly ten years in the industry, TAEMIN remains continually fuelled to create. “I receive inspiration from everything, whether that be from art, fashion, or a book. I truly believe that art comes from the five senses,” he enthuses. “It’s important to really feel the sense of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, but to pick one, I’d say that I receive the most inspiration from what I see, like a landscape, backdrop or cultural symbols. Oh, and I get inspiration from my imagination these days. For instance, when I look at the interior of the building, I try to imagine how I’d like to design the overall look and feel of it. Or sometimes the clothes that people wear that day reflect their overall mood, so I imagine why they chose the clothes and what emotion they were feeling at the time.” “I’VE PUSHED MYSELF TO CREATE MY OWN UNIQUE IDENTITY THAT DIFFERS FROM THE STANDARD K-POP” – TAEMIN He records what’s he’s discovered mostly through notes, but “there are times I just absorb and feel it then forget what it was,” TAEMIN continues. “When I say that I ‘forget’, it doesn’t mean that I really forget. What I felt doesn’t disappear, it’s like the emotions gradually build up then, one day when I think of a situation, the emotions that have been building up rush back to me.” For TAEMIN, who, like most K-Pop artists, has embodied dozens of visual concepts when performing with his group, the ones behind his solo work have come to represent something more sustainable but, simultaneously, less constrained. “I believe MOVE goes beyond being a concept, the album cannot be simply defined. There’s actually more to it than it meets the eye, it consists of different elements within the concept itself. I wanted my album to have a consistency where the concept can contain personality and the mood that my music carries,” he says with conviction. “This is why I’ve pushed myself to create my own unique identity that differs from the standard K-Pop, and I will continuously challenge myself to find diverse ways to express my music.”

[welldresseddadblog]

Welcome to the 13th instalment of the “Garmsman Dozen” question and answer session. The response so far has been tremendous. Did you miss earlier ones? There are links at the end of the page.

This week we welcome to the Garmsman Dozen Christopher Laverty from Great Britain!

Who are you, where do you live and what interests you?

Christopher Laverty. York, UK. 40 years old.

Author of book Fashion in Film, broadcaster, creator of website Clothes on Film and costume consultant.

Twitter: @clothesonfilm, Instagram: @lordlaverty, @christopherlaverty, Facebook: @clothesonfilm.

I enjoy movies, decent TV, clothes, clothes in movies, clothes in decent TV, bourbon, pipe smoking, cigars (preferably Cuban), cocktail making, cycling, running and twirling my moustache.

Thinking back to your childhood, what were your most memorable or favourite clothes?

Honestly, I don’t remember much of my childhood. Controversially I don’t many of us really do, we just piece together memories from what we’re told and photographs. With that in mind, I’ll go to my late teenage years when I first remember becoming interested in clothes. It was the mid-late 1990s so a lot of pale, shapeless denim jeans worn way too long with thick, oversized shirts and suede Kickers. This is probably why I gravitated toward the vintage scene which at this time was big on 1970s retro revival. My favourite buy was a tan leather trench coat, probably from the late 1970s, made in Egypt with a Selfridges label. It was immaculate. I purchased for £25 from Covent Garden market and still have it today. I don’t wear the coat much as it’s a little on the nose these days and verging on dress up, but at least it still fits! I do come from a family interested in clothes, particularly my dad. I was born to older parents (they are in their late eighties now) and with an older brother (now 60) and sister (53). I was spoilt rotten. Apparently, I even had a tailored coat, which to a working-class family is quite a fancy thing. My appreciation of clothes comes from understanding how they are made, their design, influences and appropriateness to the era. This is all born in me I think.

How would you describe your style today, and what are your influences?

It’s one of two things depending on my mood, time of year, facial hair and hairstyle: 1) denim and workwear, Edwardian influenced to 1930s OR 2) 1970s lounge with flared three-piece suits. I like to change things up because I get bored easily. It does have to be a specific look though – I have to feel that it ticks certain boxes, although saying that I do loathe the idea of sticking rigidly to eras or historical accuracy. My main influence for the 70’s is television programmes such as The Persuaders! and The Professionals and films such as Fear is the Key and Carlito’s Way. For workwear, it’s more print-based influences, like old photographs of miners and ranchers, but also films like The First Great Train Robbery and There Will Be Blood. I pull from wherever I like, really. Again, it’s not rigid; I’m not a re-enactor, I’m just someone who enjoys a period-specific feel to their dress.

How do you think others would describe your style and garments, do you get any reaction from friends and random strangers?

Totally, though a lot of that comes from random moustache admirers/hecklers. I don’t mind, so long as it’s polite. People will always point out what is different and, if I’m honest, I get a kick out of it. I think my friends just list random people they consider could be associated with my look – I’ve had everything from Shaft to a Spitfire pilot. It’s all good fun unless you choose to be offended (which I don’t because life is far too short to be cross and moaning all the time).

When looking for clothes, what factors play into your selections?

Need, mainly. I don’t really seek out any clothing unless I’m specifically short on something, like a henley t-shirt or new pair of boots. Most clothes come to me, in that I might stumble across a charity shop find or somebody acquires a shirt or whatever they think I’d like. I don’t really pay full price for anything. For example, I bought some suede chukka boots by Alfred Sargent last year, but only because they were offered to me by a friend who’d found them (in immaculate condition I might add) in a charity shop. I certainly didn’t need the boots but I’ll not turn my nose up at a bargain. I love clothes, though my wardrobe is actually quite capsule. I think there’s nothing worse than just buying willy-nilly and ending up with so much gear you can hardly store it all. This actually diminishes sartorial creativity in my view.

When putting together an outfit combination, do you spend a lot of time considering it?

Not really. I think I know what works and just go with that. I’ll plan more if it’s an occasion outfit but for every day I just grab what I like depending on the weather. Putting together an ensemble can be fun, but I do think if you take too long it becomes fussy and convoluted. If in doubt, take it out.

Most garmsmen will have a few “grail items” in their collection. Not to out you, but if your house is burning, which garments do you grab?

Probably my RM Williams boots. They are Craftsman Yearling, the finest boot RM Williams make in my opinion and they work with almost any outfit. I purchased on eBay nearly a decade ago for about £100. The leather is cracking a tad now but I couldn’t be without them. That said, I wouldn’t burn alive for them either so this better be a fairly mild fire we’re talking about here.

Photo by Ben Bentley

Are you budget-conscious or spendthrift? Are you a single-shot shopper, or go large and buy bulk? Where are you on slow-fashion and buying less?

I’m not spendthrift, even less so if I’m buying for others. If something fits and looks great and I can afford it and need it, I’ll buy it. I do like things that are in a sale or reduced though – it just feels more fun to make that purchase. In this respect, I wish I could support more artisan brands but they are just too rich for my blood. The sad thing is I know that the guys running these places and making these clothes and footwear are just getting by as is. If I was rich I’d probably shop with an eye toward supporting homegrown brands, but as things stand whoever can give me what I want for the best possible price is going to get my money.

Having a large collection of clothes can lead to changing outfit on a daily basis, but if you were going to wear a single outfit the next two weeks, what would it be?

My go to is probably a green ribbed cotton henley (from H&M), Marlboro leather and canvas braces (charity shop), Levi LVC 1878 jeans (eBay) and my RM Williams boots. This outfit suits just about every occasion, unless you want me attending your wedding or something. It’s comfortable to travel, work, socialise and chill in. Simple but effective in my opinion.

What would you never wear?

That’s a tough one. Basically, anything that looks awful on me, so very baggy trousers or jeans (I’m a short-ass), super-tight muscle tees (they are hilarious even if you have the body) and chunky hi-top trainers (love them on other people but I look like a failed hip-hop artist). Oh and baseball caps. Every time I put one on I look like I’m dying of some disease.

Photo by David Wade

What are your best tips for buying?

If you’re talking specifically about buying for my look, either workwear or 70’s inspired, then I’d say eBay, charity shops and vintage fairs. Got to be patient though and realise that, in the main, if you’ve found a bargain, someone else has too. People know their stuff a lot more these days so everyone has their eye out. For basics, I find H&M hard to beat. It’s not the highest quality and sometimes their stores are saturated with desperately on-trend crap, but in general, for easy tees and shirts, they are a goldmine (plus have lots of year-round sales).

Do you have a dream garment you’d love to own?

A few years ago I would have said a Savile Row suit but I think I desired one for the wrong reasons. It was a case of wanting to say I’ve had a suit cut on Savile Row rather than wanting the garment itself. I must admit I have always hankered after a beautifully tailored flared leg suit from the 1970s. I have a couple of off-the-peg examples but I’d love one bespoke. Suits of this era with that distinctive cut, the high waist, flared leg, high double vents and pagoda shoulder are not impossibly hard to find, though ones made from high-quality wool suiting are. Also, I’m a sucker for LVC Levi. I’d buy most of it just to hang on my wall and salivate over.

Anyone that buys clothes will have made mistakes, what is your most memorable bad buy?

Loads! When I used to buy more and think later I grabbed many a mistake. Possibly my worst was a pair of loose Abercrombie & Fitch jeans, from eBay if I remember correctly. Not sure what look I was going for. LA surfer, possibly? Or maybe just asshole. Either way, unsurprisingly, they didn’t work.

Do you have any style icons, historic or current?

Most of the looks I covet are from films so were put together by costume designers rather than the stars in question. Then again, stars and icons had stylists back in the day and they have stylists now. Cary Grant always nailed it. James Coburn could rock the Ivy. Nowadays Sebastian Stan constantly looks interesting without going too bananas (he has a brilliant stylist and an easy to dress bod too, mind). My elderly dad has a wonderfully open love of bright colour, which I admire and is daring for a former market trader from the East End of London. ‘Be more like him’ I often think.

Who are your favourite Instagram profiles?

What you mean apart from @Welldresseddad??? 😉 I like all the sartorial based accounts I follow. Two, in particular, indulge my passion for high-end workwear denim that I can’t afford: @kingchung501 and @vorstenbos. Anyone who doesn’t take it all too seriously, basically.

How do you think trends such as denim and heritage style will evolve and survive? What will be the next big thing?

I think more and more people will get into making their own clothes. We are not there yet, and I certainly don’t presently have the skills, but big picture I feel this will get easier and easier to do in our own home. Sustainability is a big trend and not going anywhere – and really it can’t afford to. Denim especially will go down this route. Like I said we are a way off, but with current textile innovations and online communities, it is coming.

Thank you!

Thank you for your Garmsman Chris!

Photo by David Wade

Did you miss the first Garmsman Dozens?

Jon from Great Britain

Shaun from Scotland

Klaus from Germany

Roland from Italy

Daniel from Sweden

Enoch from the USA

Even from Norway

Kris from Belgium

Michael from Great Britain

Liam from Great Britain

Lee from Great Britain

Iain from Great Britain

Michael from Italy

PS: If you have suggestions for participants, let me know. Or have your mother suggest you, if you’re a bit keen to suggest yourself. My email is WellDressedDad (@) gmail.com

  The Garmsman Dozen #14: Chris from Great Britain Welcome to the 13th instalment of the "Garmsman Dozen" question and answer session. The response so far has been tremendous.

[sussex-nature-lover]

Friday 1st January 2021

Review of the Year Q1  January, February, March 2020. Pre Pandemic Lockdown.

Hello, I’m wishing everyone a Happy, Healthy and Safe Year Ahead. We always say that don’t we, but boy does it have so much more meaning this time.

What can I say about the year just gone that hasn’t already been said? Well, they say a picture paints a thousand words so I’m going to choose some of my own photographs to illustrate the most positive things we experienced over the strangest year of our lives - the year of the Covid-19 coronavirus world pandemic, which is still raging today (and let’s hope I don’t get to say that again)

I’m cheating at the very beginning because I’m starting off by using a photo from Christmas 2019 when we had one of our usual type of trees in the Hall.

I’d usually decorate the Hall tree in the traditional red and gold

Below is the little tree that gained promotion this year, but in pink and white, silver and gold. That was a bit fancy for me, but the Owls liked it.

It put on some healthy growth throughout the year and played host to many perching little birds, mainly Blue, Great and Marsh Tits. I had to clear off all the cobwebs and take out all the bits of twig and leaf before it could come indoors.

And there it was, pressed into service. Every year in this house we’ve had at least two trees, a 7-8′ and a 5-6′ but this year, Little Tree was upgraded to the starring role. Hoorah Little Tree, you’ve done us proud. One of the best things to enjoy about the tree is all the memories that come with the decorations collected year after year from all around the world and some dating back to my Granny’s tree, although they’re looking rather delicate these days.

You can see our fairly recent tradition of perching ‘Travis’ the Christmas Pheasant in prime position just underneath the Angel. I think he looked fab this year, you can see him a bit more clearly than on a bigger tree.

January Garden Visitors: Sparrowhawk

As for January 2020, it brought some horrid bitterly cold, wet and windy weather. We were lucky on the 10th when we drove to Ms NW tE’s house and she put on a fantastic lunch that we both really enjoyed. That was the last time we sat down close at the table with anyone else outside of our own home and ate together* Last time we dined out-out was November 2018! Those were the days. 31st January 2020 was also the last time I had my hair cut - now it’s the longest it’s been since I was about half the age I am now and it might even be longer than then and still growing.

* Ms NW tY did pop around after work for supper in February and we meant to make that a fairly regular thing, but the only other time we got to eat together was when it was allowed outdoors in the Summer - sat at opposite ends of a very, very long table. That was weird.

January: sunset 

The bad wet weather had started here in late October 2019 and we were caught in flooding in Cheshire. The Fire Brigade came to pump water off the road that  we were sat on for a very long time. Much worse came with horrendous floods in Venice when some of the canals became unnavigable. World weather certainly made headlines in 2020 with flooding and raging fires devastating massive areas. The National Trust wildlife report I posted talks about the effects of the weather and climate change and what they’re trying to do to combat as much as they can.

I also see that in January we’d started to hear of Wuhan and to talk about hand washing. A friend’s sister is living in China and she’d got a flight booked to visit in April. Another friend said their lockdown and travel restrictions may be lifted by then. Little did we know.

Looking back at last year’s photos, pre blog, I was surprised I caught the Green Woodpecker in February, photo taken mid morning on the 16th. 

This may be one of the last PP pictures I took (PP = Pre Pandemic) and it’s all the more remarkable because Storm Dennis had hit us.

On the 17th we went shopping for a care package for Ms NW tY who was sick and home alone. Raging fever, cough, felt like she had a chest infection and limbs like lead. Similar to what I had back in November 2019. It took seven months for me to feel tip top again, so who knows what on earth we had - not Covid obviously because the medical experts say it wasn’t over here then. They also said no need to wear face masks and children were impervious...

I’ll just leave those thoughts there.

February Garden Visitors: lots of Pheasants 

Meanwhile we were starting to talk about handwashing - a lot, 20 seconds minimum with soap and hot water. Sing Happy Birthday to You all the way through and keep on washing. Haven’t heard that so much in a while actually.

...and toilet rolls. Any mention of a forthcoming lockdown and panic buying prompts shortages immediately. It was toilet rolls, rice, pasta and flour. I’m sticking with my illustration of handwashing using one of my favourite soaps. Portuguese Soap, hard to beat but prohibitively expensive nowadays. We just looked at that link and whistled, drawing in our breath and sighing. I’m going to be refilling that bottle with something altogether more modest. Of course, so much more choice now for something a bit different, especially closer to home. Kent Soap. I’ve been glad this year that I ask for nice soap as a gift if anyone wants to know what I’d like and we got some for Christmas too, so that’ll keep us going.

White Hyacinths and Freesias for fragrance lifting the bleak days

The pandemic seemed to get worse and we were getting alarmed. I last went into a supermarket early mid March. Since then I’ve only been in National Trust shops, the petrol station and the pharmacy. I first wore a face mask when we took the car for its MOT, also mid March. Staff looked at me as though I was a bank robber. When we went to collect the car later the same day there was a notice on the door ‘Only two customers allowed inside at any one time’ and news was starting to spread...about health precautions, not about me.

Soon MOT tests were suspended and the country was facing a lockdown. Since then we had a time when both of our cars’ batteries died. We’ve SORN (officially declared off road) one - it’s taking us all our time to keep the other ticking over.

March Garden Visitors: hungry Rabbits at the seed trays

I started to write my Blog. At first I just used Google Sheets for seven daily scribblings and then I moved to this platform. Blog Number 1 here with the urls of the first few entries at the end. Little did I know at that stage that I’d be writing every day at least once a day and still going.

As National Lockdown got underway as well as writing we all started walking again and looking at nature and baking - boy did we all embrace baking last year. There must’ve been a country-weight of Sourdough and/or Banana Bread attempted with varying degree of success...lucky Joe Wicks came on board to get everyone up and doing a bit of keep fit, People started working from home, hosted social lives by internet, online quizzes and memes became a thing, a really big Thing. If we were lucky our food shopping was delivered straight to our door, TV cookery shows were full of advice on what you could use if you couldn’t source what you really wanted.

Just as my football team was on course for its first ever Premier League Championship win, the season had to be suspended (13th March) hoping to resume in April. It was a vain hope, but as our manager Jûrgen Klopp said, health and safety is far more important than anything else...we can wait 😉

Sport around the world, like everything else, had to be put on pause.

The situation got worse and every Thursday night at 8pm we went outdoors and clapped for our carers as they battled on trying to get to grips with this new virus and people falling sick in huge numbers. It was a whole new way of life.

To be Continued

--------------

WEATHER NEWS:

Forecasters are warning of possible further chaos, because the same conditions behind the 'Beast from the East' in 2018 - one of the worst storms to hit the UK in living memory - are forming again high up in the atmosphere.  

The 'sudden stratospheric warming' (SSW) event happens when the temperature in the stratosphere soars by 50C (122F). This 'reverses' Britain's wind pattern, from the warmer west out in the Atlantic to the east – and Siberia.

It can take two weeks for the effects of a SSW to be felt. This was the case in February 2018 with the infamous Beast from the East, which saw much of the UK gripped by travel chaos and school closures amid heavy snow. 

^ Not to mention Hospital closures too, which meant my operation was cancelled.

New Year’s Day Read:

The Wildlife Trust Marine Review of 2020

This report is also covered by the Daily Mail which also includes photos, video and information from other regional trusts around the country.

Decoration from the Standen Courtyard Christmas Tree

Once again some absolutely beautiful handiwork, The Tree of Life. What better message for a brand new year.

The Tree of Life symbol represents our personal development, uniqueness and individual beauty. Just as the branches of a tree strengthen and grow upwards to the sky, we too grow stronger, striving for greater knowledge, wisdom and new experiences as we move through life. 

Music for New Year from the Rivertree Singers

a community choral ensemble in Greenville, SC. USA

‘Tomorrow Shall be my Dancing Day’ Let’s hope so.

[quadcorenewkids]

Touching the Void - Chapter 1

I’m posting this because, although I like a lot of parts about this, it feels too dragged out for a first chapter... too slow. Idk, I just have some mixed feelings, and since it’s the first chapter, I don’t mind posting it because... it’s not technically spoilers? 8D

Man, I hate how different things look from the word program to the actual post, no matter where it is. It never looks quite right :/

An evening in the McCormick household where one didn't need to fight to have dibs on the TV was a rare fucking evening indeed. In fact, Kenny's parents weren't even home... or so he assumed. If there wasn't yelling and bitching coming from somewhere within earshot, they must've been out and about. Didn't surprise him in the slightest. Kevin - pretty quiet as per usual - probably locked himself in his room so he could drink all night, and Karen - sweet, naive Karen - was already in bed at this hour, having had her dinner and going straight to bed. Hard to believe she was in Fourth Grade already. Felt like yesterday when he was back at the wonderful age of 10.             He remembered playing their games, the boys and him... being afraid of the Sixth Graders, and everything. Yet now they were he Sixth Graders... that still hadn't settled with him, even if it didn't really feel like they'd grown up at all. And having Middle School looming around the corner come next year? Yuck. He had a similar reaction when flipping the channel to the next fuzzy one. Fucking figures, the one night he didn't have to wrestle his drunk-ass brother or parents for the remote, and there was nothing good on. No sports aside from re-runs. Not even much late-night adult content to be found either. Just the fucking shopping channel - god, he hated that with an immense passion - and some boring documentaries and talk shows. He flipped over to one idly and stared blankly at the screen while the voice continued to narrate. The content on the screen wasn't memorable to him in the slightest.           "-and it begs to offer this yet unsolved question that we ask ourselves constantly: 'What were we put on this Earth to do? What is our purpose?' A-and there's just no rightful way of answering that, try as we may. It's a solution that we, as individuals must come to understand and learn for ourselves. All we can do to aid the process along, is by pushing ourselves in the general direction of self-discovery."             He had his finger on the button to switch the channel, before - at the last second - the guy on the TV added, "Which brings me to ask you... why do some people long to die?"             That caught Kenny's attention for an extra moment, "W-When you have the potential of a great, grand purpose in our lives as a result of what we were put on this Earth to do, why would you want to knowingly take your own life away? Why do most of us fear Death so greatly... but others don't? What in the world makes us so unique from one another in such a queer manner? What drives these people to do these things?"

The other man on the TV laughed at him, "Sounds more like we've got a 'Q&Q' show than a 'Q&A' now, Abe."

"These are trying topics. You try to come up with an answer. A real answer. It ain't so easy, is it?"             "Well, if you had to ask me, I'd say some people are obviously just more miserable than others. The quality of life and the gap and all that mumbo-jumbo. If you're down in the dumps long enough, it might seem like that's what you were put on the Earth to be - a metaphorical punching bag."             "Is that what you view yourself to be? You know, some experts say that our words and actions reflect how we feel about ourselves more than they affect others."             "Pfffff. You think I'm a punching bag? I'm living the dream, Abe. Or what feels like the dream... that's good enough for me."           The 'Abe' guy opened his mouth to talk again, but Kenny flipped the TV off before he could utter another word. God this night fucking sucked so far. He got up to get a drink - not a drink drink. Seeing what that shit does to other people sure has its way of souring you on even touching the stuff. Shoving the dozens of beer bottles and cans aside in the dirty old fridge, he pulled out a soda he'd stashed in the very back. It'd been opened before, so it was completely flat by now... but he honestly didn't give much of a shit. Flat or fizzy, it was still a nice treat to have, now and again.             While he sat and chugged back what was left of his week-old cola, his mind wandered back to that dumb-ass talk show again. 'What were we put on this Earth to do? What is our purpose?'

Did it really matter what the purpose was? You make something of yourself, or you don't. Either way, everyone has access to titties on the internet, and that was enough of a reason alone for some people to work and pay the bills. Can't even get a good magazine nowadays without having to pay like twenty dollars plus shipping... they don't even ship it in discreet packaging anymore! What a fucking time to be alive, when your neighbour can walk by and see the latest issue of Playboy sitting on your front step in broad daylight because some asshole couldn't be bothered to stuff it in the mailbox.

Not that he really cared... wasn't his name plastered all over it. He'd used his brother's name when ordering the subscriptions, and he didn't think anything of it when he'd answered the door the first time to pick them up. He'd probably just assumed his drunk-ass couldn't remember ordering it. He'd never complain about free titty magazines though, that would be fucking blasphemy. Kenny just had to make sure he got up early enough on mail days to be able to snag them first when he saw them... he wasn't the biggest fan of second-hand merchandise. Who could blame him?             He crunched the can up with one hand and tossed it in the general direction of the trash can. It hadn't been emptied in weeks, so it just kind of harmlessly bounced off the heaping pile of other cans and rolled on the floor. He'd have to do something about that at some point soon.

He once caught Karen trying to clean up the disaster that was the kitchen. Poor girl almost cut herself on a bottle that'd been broken at some point. After that, Kenny told her that she shouldn't clean up broken bottles and cans - at the very least, not without using a towel or something to protect her hands with. He'd insisted that he'd try to tidy up a bit in her place... but he'd gotten lazy. It gets to a point where if you're the only one in the whole fuckin' house making an effort to clean up, you just don't feel like it's even worth trying. But he'd do it eventually. For Karen's sake, at the very least.             With a sigh, he sauntered over to his room and shut the door quietly behind him. He always made a note to try and do that. No reason to slam doors around and, on the off-chance, wake up his sister. His parents did that enough, that quiet days like this were just... unheard of. This whole evening had been a fucking weird one. He flopped down on his bed and stared at the ceiling for a moment.           "Some people are obviously just more miserable than others. The quality of life and the gap and all that mumbo-jumbo. If you're down in the dumps long enough, it might seem like that's what you were put on the Earth to be - a metaphorical punching bag."             He snatched his pillow and buried his face into it, heaving another sigh. Maybe he shouldn't of even bothered trying to watch TV, if all he can think about is a stupid fucking talk show... but when he thought about it, Kenny kind of felt like a punching bag. Some days, more literally than others. No matter what people threw at him though, he would bounce back from anything. Always coming back, to no one ever remembering. No one remembers the punching bag. He rolled over and glared at the wall. It was going to be one of these nights again, huh? He hadn't gone on such a downward spiral since... since Fourth Grade. Everything had fuckin flown by the past couple years. The usual weird shit would happen every once in a while, but he felt like he was getting involved in it less and less. Stan, Kyle, and Cartman would go off and do shit on their own after school somedays, and it was like they never thought to ask him to join. On one hand, Kenny wasn't complaining – fuck no. That meant he'd been through less shit that could end up with him dead again.           On the other hand... he sort of missed it. He hadn't even worn the Mysterion outfit in what felt like fucking forever... when had he last gone out in it? He got up and went over to the dresser to take a look. It was exactly where he'd left it last time - placed in the bottom drawer. Forgotten. He picked it up and held it out to get a good look at it. It was so small, to him. Had it really been that long? He slowly took his parka off and put the cape on overtop of his shirt. It didn't drag on the floor like it used to, that was for sure. The first few times he'd worn it, he remembered being a dumbass and tripping over it on a few occasions. He'd twisted his ankle once or twice, and one instance actually involved him falling off a roof. That had been agony.             Yet he hadn't cut it any shorter or anything. He'd instead persevered and got used to knowing where it was and how to not trip on it. He casually grabbed an edge of the cape and brought it close to his face in what was meant to be a dramatic pose. At least it was long enough to do that, anyway. The hood was a bit small though... and he didn't even dare try on that light purple one-piece. He took a look in the drawer again to find the half-mask sitting at the bottom. He slipped it on over his head, but it was so tight on his eyes. With a scoff, he'd pulled the ensemble off and shoved it back in the drawer. Maybe there was a fucking reason he'd stopped wearing that thing. All it did now was bring back memories of that fucking cult.             But it had good memories associated with it too. He'd protected his little sister against bullies in Greely as Mysterion... he'd even become a 'Guardian Angel' to her. That, was what made it worth it. That was why he'd kept wearing it up until last year. He wanted to protect people that couldn't do it alone. He wanted to be this stupid little mountain town's 'guardian angel'... to keep it safe from fucking monsters. He scowled at the open drawer now, at the outfit thrown into a ball and wrinkled to hell. Cartman had been one of those monsters... he'd been fucking insane to drag an Elder God into his schemes. He certainly didn't miss hanging out with him. "Friend" or not.           Kenny didn't bother to close the drawer before stumbling back to his bed and throwing himself upon it again - this time sans parka. Maybe he'd bring back the persona... maybe he wouldn't. He honestly didn't want to think about it anymore... he just wanted the night to be over so he could just go back to school tomorrow - words he never thought would pass his mind. But all that kept coming back to mind was that... Fucking... Talk show.             "'What were we put on this Earth to do? What is our purpose?'... It's a solution that we, as individuals must come to understand and learn for ourselves. All we can do to aid the process along, is... push... ourselves in the general direction of self-discovery."           He'd tried that once. It didn't end up all that great.

People don't really realize when they drift off to sleep. It's just a quiet cloak of darkness that overtakes the mind... it's nigh undetectable.         He wasn't any different, at first. He didn't know he was dreaming. It felt... too real.             This place felt familiar... but for the life of him, he couldn't fucking remember where he was, exactly. It was like it kept changing... shifting... the lighting bounced around the ground like water at the bottom of a pool. The sand was red... no, not sand. Dirt. Or... stone? Kenny couldn't focus on it at all, like he'd pulled an all-nighter and hit the point where he just couldn't *mentally* stay awake anymore. The area around him was hazy, and alien. Strange plants - if you could even call them 'plants' - and formations were all around him... nothing familiar besides that feeling deep down that he'd been here once before.             The only thing that knocked him out of his stupor was a voice from behind him, but it sounded like he'd missed part of the conversation before it... "...maybe we should just find a place to hide and wait for help!"           That sounded like... someone he knew... Another voice reverberated, this time right next to him, "What help, dude? Nobody in the real world even knows we're here."           Kenny finally looked towards the source of the voices. They were like mirages... blurry... but he recognized them. He recognized the words. Clyde and Kyle. Mentioning the real world? But that meant... This was R'Lyeh. It came to him like a slap in the face, waking him from the hazy phase he'd just been in. The weird lighting, the even weirder tentacle plants and shit... the other boys in costumes... and then he saw himself walk from where he stood, like he'd waltzed right out of his own body, donned as Mysterion. He felt a distant pain in his gut, as he watched himself take charge and insist he'd find help. He knew what was coming all too well.             Quite frankly, he didn't want to fucking relive it a second time. He closed his eyes to block it out as he heard Clyde call his name. He'd forgotten to block the sound out... and it was a horrid sound. And the pain! The pain hit him like a fucking truck, like he'd actually gone and done it again! Seething agony for what felt like an eternity... and then darkness overcame him again.

He woke up in a cold sweat, grasping at his chest for the spikes he'd known were there when he'd purposefully plunged himself upon them. He laid there, catching his breath and trying to cement himself back in reality for a good long moment, before glancing over at the clock. Four in the morning. It didn't feel that long had passed, but who the fuck knew, when you were asleep, right? Time flew by like nobody's damn business... he'd wished for it earlier in the night. Now, he regretted it. That's not what he fucking meant by it at all.

He glanced at his hands, then passed them through his hair, cringing when he realized it had slicked back somewhat from the sweat on his brow.             Fuck this night sucked.

[cinnaminsvga]

01 | ghost!hoseok

→ summary: Drabble series featuring Hoseok the Friendly Ghost. Based on this prompt: “You are depressed, and then become possessed by a very nice ghost. He works to improve your life.” → genre: Fluff, Slight Angst, Ghost!AU → words: 1.4K → a/n: Will edit this later! Enjoy my weird ghost!hoseok au I guess?

All in all, you suppose that having the Happiest Ghost in the World™ possessing your body had its perks. 

For starters, you are allowed to become the lazy motherfucker that you are truly meant to be. You can just close your eyes and let your ghost move you as he pleased and allow him to take control instead. In fact, all of your household chores have settled to the back of your mind because of this, and while your ghost has undoubtedly chastised you for that many times, he continues to do them for you regardless.

So really, the only major drawback from being possessed is that every time you want to do something else, you pretty much have no say in the matter.

“Hoseok, I know you’re trying to do this for my sake, but I don’t think wearing an all yellow ensemble is going to help me get over my depression,” you deadpan, your body already moving on its own accord. 

Your mouth suddenly moves without your consent, your voice sounding deeper than what anyone would expect a young woman to sound like. “Y/N, of course yellow clothes will help you get over your depression! It’s not called the happiest color for nothing!” 

The sun has barely risen up above the horizon, and while normally you’d still be dead asleep until noon, Hoseok had decided when he had first possessed you that the both of you were going to be early risers from now on. You can barely count the number of times you had suddenly found yourself standing in front of your kitchen, with an entire buffet laid out in front of you like a goddamn culinary masterpiece. You didn’t even know how to pour yourself a bowl of cereal sometimes, much less prepare a perfect eggs benedict.

To any outsider, you did not appear to be a victim of a possession at all. The only indicator that you were not in control of your own actions was that despite having your eyes closed, you were still efficiently preparing a cup of piping hot coffee for yourself.

“I swear, if I was any less mentally ill, I would be dragging my body over to the nearest exorcist right now.”

“Well, you aren’t any less mentally ill, so there’s nothing you can do!” Hoseok chirps back, and you don’t hide the groan that escapes you.

In all consideration, you can’t be too mad at what he made you wear. You have to admit that the yellow Gudetama onesie that he forced you to buy was comfy as fuck.

Despite your stubborn possessor (body roommate?), your arrangement with Hoseok was mostly a congenial one, if one could call a ghost possession that. You mostly let him do as he pleased, seeing as how he was really the only reason you even got out of bed every day. You no longer needed to think about taking care of yourself because Hoseok did that for you. Hell, he even fucking showered for you, which had been an amusing first few weeks for sure. (To say the least, Hoseok was a very hygienic person, at least when he had been alive. You, on the other hand... “Wait, you haven’t showered in three weeks? Oh fuck, does that mean I have to shower you too? Oh my god this is so fucking awkward—")

It was sort of like letting yourself go on autopilot, except that the installed artificial intelligence was an annoying, over excitable ghost who had decided that he was going to “improve” your depression by being an overbearing ghost mother hen.

Okay, so the overbearing part isn’t always true; Hoseok at least knows your limits. On most days, you both will stay at home either watching old reruns of Running Man on the TV or maybe rereading your favorite book for the nth time. Hoseok tries suggesting trips outside on your better days, when your depressive cloud isn’t as heavy and you at least have some energy to comb your hair by yourself. Those days, you always almost say yes.

Almost.

“Hey Y/N?”

“Hm?"

"I was thinking of visiting the park today.” Hoseok says this with as much nonchalance as he can muster, but the thing about sharing one body is that you can sense his emotions as well. You notice how hesitant he is when he asks you, and you know exactly why. 

The last time he had forced you to leave your home was also the last time you had shut him out of your brain, something you had not been aware of being capable of at the time. It generally required a lot of energy—which was something you rarely had—but he knew that if he pushed you too hard, you would shut him out in an instant.

“I don’t know Hoseok, but today isn’t a very good day for me…” Your voice trails off because you know that it is a weak excuse. You know that your depression is pathetic, that you are pathetic. When had been the last time you had a “good day?” 

You know that he is only trying to help you in his weird ghostly way, but you also know that the moment you step outside your door, you’d want nothing more than to slip back under your covers and never resurface again.

It was moments like these when you wished that Hoseok hadn’t possessed you—not because he was unpleasant company or anything. In fact, you could even say that his presence was one of the only high points in your measly existence, despite how pitiful that sounded. You just wished he had possessed someone happier, someone who actually functioned.

You didn’t deserve his kindness. You didn’t deserve anything.

“I can hear you thinking, you know.” He whispers sadly, but you know he’s bluffing. You both couldn’t hear each others thoughts, but he knows you well enough that he can almost physically feel you beating yourself up again. It happens too often for him to be surprised anymore.

“Sorry, it’s just that… I don’t think it’s a good idea. I just don’t want you dragging my comatose body back home after I have another... episode.” You try joking to lighten the sudden tense mood, but the joke hits a little too close to reality. Hoseok could count on two hands the number of times that very scenario actually happened, and he didn’t want the count to reach his toes as well. 

“It’s okay, I won’t force you. It was just a suggestion.” Despite his cool tone, you can still sense the dejection radiating off him in waves. You know he misses going outside and seeing the sun, the trees, the buildings. Most importantly, he misses seeing and talking to other human beings other than your sad excuse of a person.

For any ghost who missed experiencing life, you were definitely the worst possible candidate for a possession.

“If you really really want to go, I won’t stop you from dragging my body outside.” The words leave your mouth before you realize what you had just suggested. You know what would happen when you leave your home; you both did. But why were you trying so hard to please him? Why were you trying to make the pout he was making your mouth form go away?

“N-no, it’s okay. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” He chuckles lightly, and he moves your arm to pat your own head in assurance. When he had done this the first few times before, you had thought that it was odd to caress yourself so lovingly. Nowadays, you can’t help but let your head chase after your own hand when he moves it away, already missing the weirdly sweet gesture.

“Are you sure? Because I can probably let myself suffer for an hour if it’ll stop you from pouting so much. Do you know how many pout lines I’m gonna get when I get older because of you?”

The pout on your face instantly disappears. Jokes about the future are always a good sign to Hoseok. It means you were thinking past tomorrow.

“I promise I’ll stop pouting. Now come on, let’s watch that one Running Man episode again. The one with Big Bang.”

You grin, but you’re not entirely sure if it was because of you or Hoseok. 

“That one always almost makes me laugh.” Almost.

“I know. That’s why we’re going to watch it.”

Sometimes, Hoseok didn’t need to do too much to improve your life. It was moments like this when he let you heal in your own time that you felt the best. 

It was a good day.

[aion-rsa]

Game of Thrones at 10: The Series That Changed TV Forever

https://ift.tt/3dn9imD

During the Game of Thrones series finale, there’s an exchange between Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister that is as much about the series’ legacy as it is the characters’ inner turmoil. Only a handful of scenes earlier, these same two men conspired to murder the woman they called their queen, Daenerys Targaryen. Now living with the consequences of that heavy deed—with Jon again banished to the white hell Beyond the Wall and Tyrion conscripted to a lifetime of public service—a tormented Jon asks his friend was it right what they did?

“Ask me again in 10 years,” Tyrion says tersely. After all these years, the craftiest of Lannisters finally has learned he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know—and who really knows how the decisions in the here and now will appear to posterity? It’s easy to speculate that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt the same way about their controversial ending to Game of Thrones. And like Tyrion and Jon, they probably could not anticipate the entire fallout that was to come.

It’s been two years since the contentious farewell to the series that defined its pop culture decade. But define it, it did. Running from 2011 to 2019, the show’s rise and fall traces eerily close to the rhythms of its era, perhaps more so than any series ever produced. It launched as the biggest gamble in premium cable history, and it ended as the most popular televised phenomenon of the 2010s. Some have argued Game of Thrones was the last of the “watercooler shows.” Even the divisiveness of its finale was monumental, shaping the next era of TV in still unseen ways. Pop culture really does live on in the realm forged by HBO’s fire and blood.

So while it hasn’t been a full 10 years since Tyrion dodged Jon’s question, a decade has passed from the moment three riders in black emerged from an icy gate, and Game of Thrones premiered on HBO. That’s more than enough time to ask what did Game of Thrones mean to us and the television landscape it shaped?

The Coming of Winter

Television was a different universe in April 2011. Netflix was still that mail rental/streaming company which didn’t produce its own content, storytelling was full of cynicism, and cable television remained king. But within that fiefdom, HBO was facing a problem: the once undisputed ruler of premium cable drama was now seeing challengers for its throne.

“HBO was still coming out of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood,” Michael Lombardo, then-HBO programming president, told James Hibberd for Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, an oral history on the making of the series. “We were getting questions like, ‘Why did you not get Mad Men? How come you didn’t pick up Breaking Bad?’ We had been the place for all things quality drama and were looking to regain our footing. But Game of Thrones didn’t seem to fall into our category.”

In retrospect, it obviously should have. Based on George R.R. Martin’s sprawling A Song of Ice and Fire book series, the show was pitched (somewhat inaccurately) as The Sopranos meets Lord of the Rings. Martin may have written his novels to be unfilmable, but at HBO, Benioff and Weiss would create an impressive facsimile of his Westeros on a budget.

Very much a product of its time, Game of Thrones came out at the tail-end of the “antihero” era of television, the period where HBO led the way in populating TV with flawed if not outright repugnant protagonists. A reaction to television being defined by network censorship for all the decades before the 21st century, the sliding spectrum of lapsed morality between Don Draper (Mad Men) and Tony Soprano was exhilarating in its time. But unlike all those series, Game of Thrones was offering a vast tapestry of protagonists in its ensemble, which provided an even greater range of moral complexity than most popular American shows at that time.

There were fantasy stalwart heroes like Lord Eddard Stark (Sean Bean) and his oldest sons, but also enigmas such as Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), antiheroes who were introduced as full-on villains (read: most of the Lannisters), and young heroines whose nigh transcendentalist adventures belied darker traumas, such as Arya Stark (Maisie Williams). It was both of its moment and a far cry from the cynicism of other popular shows, not to mention the popular image of fantasy, which on the small screen was closer to Xena: Warrior Princess than Lord of the Rings.

“There were a fair number of reasons not to do it,” Carolyn Strauss told Hibberd about the show’s early days at HBO. As the former HBO programming president who first greenlit the Game of Thrones pilot, and then became executive producer on the series, Strauss can recall the apprehension she felt toward the idea of making a fantasy series for adults. “There are many ways a fantasy series can go south. Any show that relies on a mythology that isn’t thought out in enormous detail can go off the rails. You’re maybe good for a season or two, and then after that you start running into brick walls.”

Yet it was Thrones’ moral complexity in such a dense, heightened world that caught Strauss off-guard. “The way [Benioff and Weiss] told the story in the meeting made it sound much more involved and character-driven than I usually feel from fantasy stories. It was not good vs. evil, but characters who had elements of both things.”

That level of nuance was shocking when Game of Thrones premiered in 2011. Nowadays the series is often reduced by TV critics as being simply the show that introduced convincing blockbuster spectacle to the small screen. But in its early seasons that really wasn’t the case. While Benioff and Weiss were quietly aware of how massive in scope Martin’s novels eventually became, they sold the series to HBO as a “chamber piece,” not a symphony. It’s about intimate family drama—at least in the first season/novel—not magic and battles.

In that first episode, there was hardly an unsullied viewer who didn’t gasp when sweet 10-year-old Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) was pushed out a window by Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). The thrill wasn’t seeing dragons lay waste to armies; the excitement was found in character moments or decisions with drastic repercussions on every other scene that followed. At its heart, it was a fantasy series drenched in human psychology and human history (particularly that of the English War of the Roses), and those hooks made the eventual ice and fire spectacle that much more extraordinary five years down the line.

Game of Thrones didn’t come out of the gate as a culture defining event—its series premiere netted just 2.2 million viewers, about 1.6 million less than HBO’s similarly epic and ill-fated Rome—but like the armies of one silver haired queen from the east, it’s rise seemed blessed to gradually, and unwaveringly, build until the bloody end.

A Golden Crown

The moment that personally got me wholeheartedly invested into Game of Thrones, however, wasn’t Bran’s fall from a Winterfell tower, nor was it Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion verbally humiliating his demon seed nephew. The scene where the show fully clicked was in the sixth episode, “A Golden Crown.” Up until that moment, the series was dense on world-building and lore, but the narrative was so finely tuned, and hidden in such a tightly wound coil, that it could feel impenetrable at first blush. It also seemed to be built on a certain set of fantasy archetypes, such as the noble hero Ned Stark and the old fat king, Robert (Mark Addy).

Another seeming archetype was Viserys Targaryen, a malicious blonde-haired misanthrope played so ably by Harry Lloyd that one would recoil when he was on screen. Technically, he’s a lonely exiled prince whose family lost its dynasty. But as seen through the eyes of Clarke’s put-upon and abused Daenerys, Viserys’ younger sister whom he mercilessly abused, Viserys was really just an ugly bully. The kind you might imagine Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy growing into, except with the creepy addition of a leering, incestuous gaze. Also like Draco, I feared Dany would have to endure his pestering for the rest of the series.

Then “A Golden Crown” occurs, and Viserys is plucked from the series like leaden dead weight. Moments before his death, Viserys has realized that no matter how much he calls himself king, no one will follow him. Meanwhile Dany has won the hearts of the Dothraki, a nomadic warrior culture. She now rules as their Khaleesi (queen) alongside Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa), the husband Viserys sold her to. Viserys expected Drogo to become his mercenary, but by episode 6, that obviously is never going to happen. So his simmering resentment seemed to suggest Viserys would undermine Dany’s fledgling power and character growth at every future opportunity. But at the end of “The Golden Crown,” the self-styled king threatens Daenerys before the whole Dothraki court, and perhaps more chillingly in Dany’s eyes, threatens to cut out the baby growing inside her womb if he does not get his way.

Drogo ultimately gives Viserys what he wants: a crown. Only it’s made from the molten hot liquid gold he’s melted down to pour on the wretch’s head. Daenerys watches the gold slowly boil before the deed is done, and she sees her brother begging for his life. But the moment he raised her hand against her unborn child, the man was already dead to her. After Viserys’ head is crushed by the burning gold running through his skull, she doesn’t even blink. Rather Clarke says with maximum disaffection, “He was no dragon. Fire cannot kill a dragon.”

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This hard left turn in the plotting was so sudden and shocking that it signaled what the series would become: a narrative where every character’s action and decision (at least pre-season 7) had potent consequences. Narrative conventions could be cut short in an instance. In this case, it was one that left viewers thrilled, but a few episodes later the same creative instinct would shatter them when the series’ main lead, poor Ned, lost his head. Such twists led me to buy all of Martin’s books and read them within a few months.

However, there was something more unsettling about the sequence. Daenerys Targaryen, our ostensible hero in her own storyline, did not flinch or bat an eye at her brother’s demise. He was rotten to the core, but Dany was no more affected by his death than she would be at the sight of hundreds of strangers crucified along a road on her order (an event which would occur later in the series).

The ambiguity of some of these characters, including Dany who in the early seasons was initially presented as an impending threat to the Starks and Lannisters a world away in Westeros, is what gave the drama so much life. There were reasons to root for nearly every faction and reasons to have pause with each character. You knew, eventually, your favorites would be in mortal conflict. While featuring a greater array of heroes than any of the other popular cable shows of the early 2010s, Game of Thrones also wallowed in moral relativity and bleakness. In 2011, it was like a high; in 2021, that kind of televised storytelling has largely fallen out of popularity.

Thrones also had a hand in that shift.

“Tits and Dragons”

For all of Game of Thrones’ good qualities, they cannot be extracted from its sins. Ten years ago, premium cable networks indulged in heavy use of obligatory nudity (mostly of young women) to keep viewers watching. Game of Thrones didn’t invent this, but it pushed it to its limit in the early seasons, even leading to the new term of “sexposition,” which describes when a show cynically includes images of naked women, usually portrayed as prostitutes in Thrones’ case, in the background during dry exposition.

Even before Thrones ended, these elements had aged badly, and were notably toned down in the later seasons. But they still occurred, even as gags, up to and including the final year. Neil Marshall, who directed two battle episodes on the series, even recalled in 2012 a disquieting note he received from an executive on the episode “Blackwater.”

“This particular exec took me to one side and said, ‘Look, I represent the pervert side of the audience okay?’” Marshall said. “‘Everybody else is the serious drama side, [but] I represent the perv side of the audience, and I’m saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene.’”

This cavalier attitude about using (some might say exploiting) young actresses who are anxious for a job on a popular series in such a gratuitous way contributed to the creation of a new profession in Hollywood: the intimacy coordinator. The actual HBO series which finally triggered this was The Deuce, not Game of Thrones. Still, Thrones most famously contributed to that sensationalism on television. So much so one of its most lauded guest stars, Ian McShane, deadpanned the show was only about “tits and dragons.” It became the figurehead for a media culture so problematic that there needed to be a reckoning at all networks and streamers in the post-#MeToo era.

That those elements on Game of Thrones were so often used in association with rape or sexual violence has led to a long overdue reevaluation of how stories with women are told in popular media—particularly from writers’ rooms dominated by men.

In truth, Game of Thrones has a litany of fascinating and complex female characters, many of whom end up in positions of power during the final seasons despite the grueling restraints of a medieval patriarchal society. Stars like Sophie Turner, whose Sansa Stark concludes the series as Queen in the North, has argued the series is actually quite feminist in its depiction of a wide range of nuanced female leads navigating medieval misogyny. And Clarke has said the show has taught her to “embrace her feminism.”

Yet both actors’ characters were forced to endure scenes of rape and sexual assault on the series, quite graphically in Clarke’s case during the first season. Even 10 years ago, viewers were rightfully disturbed by that. Clarke’s own thoughts on the use of nudity in the first season have also evolved. These elements, which only seem more glaring to the modern eye, have inspired a shift in how all “adult” stories are told, as well as how fantasy stories and historical dramas are received by audiences increasingly critical of one-sided titillation.

Those scenes likely contributed to the fan backlash when Clarke’s Daenerys, who suffered so much early on only to remake herself as a godlike savior, was revealed to be painfully mortal… turning into the villain of her own story.

A Legacy of Conflict

Game of Thrones began as a gamble for HBO, but even in its first year the bet was paying off when the fantasy show with dragons and ice zombies was nominated for Best Drama Series at the Emmys. Dinklage would go on to win his first of four Emmys for playing Tyrion that year, and even as the show lost the top prize then, it would eventually win Best Drama Series in four subsequent years.

It’s also worth noting that Dany’s dragons were barely present in the first season. Before the 2011 finale, they were creatures of a bygone age that, we’re told repeatedly, have long gone extinct. But in the final minutes of season 1, her ancient dragon eggs hatch, and a scene of biblical import plays out when she emerges from ashes as the Mother of Dragons. With each following year, Dany’s children grew larger in size, as did the pyrotechnics they unleashed. They were not much bigger than cats when they burned down a city of slavers in season 3. By the show’s end, they were the size of 747 jets while laying waste to Lannister armies.

As the creatures grew, so did Game of Thrones’ budget and, just as importantly, its audience. No other series in the modern era grew bigger with each season, from the cradle to its grave. In an age where Netflix invented the term “binge watching,” Game of Thrones remained the rare holdout of old school appointment television, with most audiences simultaneously watching live when the episode premiered on Sunday nights. Entire cottage industries based on fan speculation were born, and reading Martin’s books like they were sacred texts with hidden meanings that only the most learned scholar could translate became a pastime.

The first season premiered with 2.2 million people watching; the final season debuted with an audience of 17.4 million viewers. The finale brought in 19.3 million viewers. By comparison, the most popular scripted drama series on network television in 2019, This is Us, was averaging around 7-8 million viewers.

Yet as its popularity grew with its dragons, so did a vocal sense of dissatisfaction. There was a confluence of factors involved, many of them having to do with showrunners Benioff and Weiss running out of Martin novels to adapt. While they had a rough outline of how the series would end, the final two seasons of Game of Thrones arguably felt at points like just that: an outline the series was hitting by bullet point in each episode, often without the intricate plotting that made the early seasons and novels so addictive.

Yet it was really only during the series’ final two episodes, as a long built-up dragon fulfilled his destiny, that the rift between audience expectation and artistic intent erupted into a social media outrage. After watching Dany’s power build and build, and spending the final seasons with her pivoting from a threat to the Starks and King’s Landing to their ally against the Army of the Dead, Dany did what the series had long been famous for: she took a hard left turn.

In the final few hours of the series, Daenerys burns down the Westerosi capital, kills tens of thousands of people, and takes the Iron Throne in fire and blood, just like her ancestors. It was not the ending audiences, including myself, wanted for Dany, and it was an ending that disappointed even Clarke. Especially Clarke.

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In many ways, it is one of the most Martin-esque elements of the series’ final years. You were promised high fantasy excitement and then got the cold, harsh reality of death and suffering. The fairy tales and fables which inspired modern fantasy are often derived from uglier histories and troubling sides of human nature. This is what conquest looks like, be it by dragon or sword.

Unfortunately, the execution of the ending left something to be desired. And there are plenty of write-ups out there to unpack the problems with the final season. Nonetheless, it is fair to wonder if for the first time in the series’ whole run, the show was finally out of step with the zeitgeist, and the subversion that was celebrated a decade earlier was no longer of the moment? When the show premiered, it was a realpolitik fantasy about the corrupting influence of power and how it can be wielded. When the series ended, corrupt abusers of power were on the rise around the world. Even Martin noted it was like King Joffrey had come to the White House.

The series not only denied viewers their favorite theories for the series’ end, but also a sense of escape from a world that was feeling uncomfortably closer to Westeros than it had eight years earlier.

In its own realm though, Game of Thrones was a series that shaped the modern television landscape. Spectacle on a scale comparable to Hollywood blockbusters is now deemed as attainable by content creators with deep enough pockets. Amazon paid $1 billion for the television rights of Lord of the Rings alone. But the industry has also reacted to Thrones and the antihero era it came from with a growing sense of wariness, too.

One of Game of Thrones’ contemporaries from its heyday was The Walking Dead. As another gritty, violent, and at times nihilistic genre show that became a mainstream hit, The Walking Dead started in the same TV season as Thrones. And one of its most pivotal writers from those earlier glory days, former showrunner Glen Mazzara, recently tweeted about the change in the industry’s tenor.

“TV development today is all about optimism,” Mazzara wrote. “Buyers don’t want anything dark or bleak.” While he then went on to add that he’s nonetheless writing the “darkest [and] scariest” thing of his career, the point remains that what was once the most popular thing on television, first as austere dramas and then as gory spectacles in shows like Thrones and The Walking Dead, is out of step in a modern TV landscape that has reacted to those shows.

Ironically, genre is more popular than ever, but the moral ambiguity and relativity that attracted HBO to Benioff and Weiss’ pitch is not. Rather than antiheroes, television is increasingly dominated by good natured and heroic individuals (Marvel Studios is even making the most popular shows). Characters, meanwhile, are proactively trying to solve social problems, not reveling in how broken things are. Creative spaces are also thankfully becoming more inclusive, giving a platform to a wider range of voices, including writers’ rooms where someone might be able to say the equivalent of, “You know, maybe Sansa shouldn’t be raped by Ramsay Bolton?”

This environment is a reaction to the popularity and then backlash endured by Game of Thrones. Which means our relationship to the series is far from over, even as the show’s run becomes an increasingly distant memory.

And yet, there’s (clearly) much to be said about what Game of Thrones accomplished in its time, right down to ending the way it did. It’s hard to imagine a show becoming that popular again and existing with such artistic freedom, and for its creators to be allowed to end it where they would like. Even in the 2010s it was rare, hence The Walking Dead lumbering onto an eleventh season this fall as a pale shadow of its former self. When that series ends, it also really won’t be the end, with more spinoffs, movies, and other forms of content planned.

Under new management, HBO has signaled they’ve developed a similar temperament, even with Game of Thrones. Benioff, Weiss, and apparently Martin saw their story end exactly the way they wanted to (even if few agreed with them). But the network has announced five live-action spinoff series in various stages of development, plus an animated one on HBO Max. In the age of endless streaming content, it’s easy to imagine that every corner of Westerosi history will be explored if WarnerMedia thinks there is an appetite.

Our feelings toward the legacy of Game of Thrones have evolved over the last 10 years, and will likely continue to do so for another 10. But it was a show that hit the right beats at the right time, and changed the culture while doing so. It burned brightly and then snuffed out its candle on its own terms. You don’t have to wait a decade to appreciate how rare, and unforgettable, that really is.

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Interview with the Script Consultant on The Tribe - Harry Duffin

In this interview, we are pleased to put forward questions to Harry Duffin, the script consultant on The Tribe. You can find another interview with Harry Duffin in his role as the co-devisor of The Tribe by clicking here. We would like to thank Harry Duffin for his time in answering these questions. THE INTERVIEW 1. What is your name? Harry `Running Wolf` Duffin. (Not really, but I was brought up on Cowboy and Indian films, and when I visited Monument valley recently, I felt like I had found my spiritual home.) 2. What do you do (in one sentence)? I supervise the writing of all the scripts for the series. 3. How do you do this? What are the processes involved from start to finish typically? Every month the writing team (currently eight writers) meet for a day and thrash out the stories for the next eight scripts. We all throw ideas in, And it`s up to me to decide which way we are going to take the stories. (There are many different routes to go each time, but someone has to make a decision, right or wrong, or we`d be there all week). For the first series I then went away with the bare outlines, fleshed them Out in more detail and then commissioned individual writers to write one script each. On series two I have two other writers who help me develop the storylines from the meeting, as it was getting impossible to do justice to all the stories and characters on my own. (As the series develops, so does the back story, and it takes more than one brain to keep all the plates spinning). When the writers are commissioned they all send me a scene by scene breakdown based on the outline I have sent them. This is the structure of the episode. A famous writer once said, screenplays are structure, and that`s true. This is the chance for the writer to use their craft in teasing out a story in the most gripping way possible. You know how some people are just natural storytellers? Whether in the playground or the pub, they know how to weave the story to hold our attention. That`s what the writer does with the structure. They can`t change what in the episode, but they can choose how they tell it. After I`ve seen the structure, the writer has about ten days to write a first draft script (about fifty pages in TV script form). I then read that, make notes on continuity, character and the dramatic quality, and try to make helpful suggestions, (if needed). The writer then incorporates those notes in a second draft. Most writers need a second draft `cos none of us are perfect. If the second draft needs a little `tweak` here and there, that`s my job. No script leaves my pc for New Zealand until I`ve approved it. 4. Which other departments do you work with in the process and in what way? Naturally, Ray Thompson, the executive producer and creator of the series Has an input throughout the scripting process. Even though he is based in New Zealand and can`t attend most of the writers` meetings, he and I talk regularly on the phone about the way the series is shaping up, and he will often have brilliant ideas that take us along a route none of the rest of us have seen. (It was his idea for the tribal gathering in series one, for example.) If we want to do something in the scripts that i think may be a problem logistically, I call our production executive in N.Z., Geoff Husson, and talk it over with him. Generally, Geoff comes up with a way of doing the most difficult things. And I think you have to agree that the production values for the series are terrific. The beauty of this series is that there are so few people who have the final say on the scripts. That`s heaven for a Writer or script editor, who often have to suffer (and act on) inane comments by everyone from the office cleaner to the producer`s cat! (Ask most writers who`ve worked in Hollywood, where they have teams of executives, all with their own ideas, and all of whom think they are great writers just because they can write their name on a cheque.) 5. What are the factors that affect and inspire a script or a storyline? Heavens, what a question! There`s loads of factors! Continuity of story and character, balance between short-term and long-term stories, high drama and low comedy ­ that`s where the actors often have the greatest influence. Until you`ve seen an actor on the screen you are writing blind in a sense, because the actor rarely looks, sounds, or even acts as you`d imagined in your head. The actor playing Jack, for example, was a total revelation to us. A wonderful sense of timing for the comic line. So, we write more comedy for him. However, Antonia (Trudy) has a natural affinity with high-drama, so we are steering her stories in a certain way. The actress may want to play comedy, but too bad. Sorry, Antonia, I`m sure you`re a great comic actress too! The same with the rest of the cast. I`m sure youıll agree that we have assembled one of the finest ensemble groups of young actors the world has ever seen. (Don`t let that go to your heads, guys, you`re only as good as your next line!) This is too big a subject to cover here, youıll have to wait until my book on screenwriting comes out!

6. Can you describe a typical working day - what is your routine? Typical working day? I`m usually at my desk before eight, sometimes much earlier if I wake up in the dark with an idea to make a problem in a script work. No point in making a mental note and going back to sleep, it`ll be gone in the morning. I work all day with a brief break for lunch, and a walk (or swim) in the morning and afternoon. Exercise is one of the best ways of revitalising the brain. Sitting down all day is the worst way to create. I`ve had some of my best solutions to a clitch in a script when walking by the sea, or through a park (preferably empty). I usually finish when my wife, Chris, calls me for dinner, around seven. That`s if things are working well. If not, it`s back to work after dinner, and no wine till I`ve finished! The work is reading scripts, liasing with writers, polishing final drafts to E-mail to N.Z. trying all the while to keep the stories for about sixteen episodes spining in my head. It`s easy to miss an important character point If you don`t keep referring back to earlier scripts. When there`s a problem (when isn`t there?) I work weekends too. That`s a pain for my wife and my friends, but for me, it isn`t work, `cos this series is a joy to work on. And I think it shows all the way through the production. Pride. 7. Are there any ideas or approaches that you considered but did not use in The Tribe? If so, what are they - and why were they not used? Yes, there are some subjects that are just too edgy for the age-range. I won`t go into details, but we did develop a storyline for one character, and even wrote the scripts, and then ditched it. It was a series in itself, and a very dark one at that. Maybe in series twenty [or thereabouts] we`ll dig it out again. Other than that, weıll use anything thatıs appropriate, and that pushes the envelope a little if we can. Production time pressure means having to make decisions and stand by them. With our schedule there`s not the luxury of going back time and again. Some people think we were crazy to kill Zoot, for example, but once we`d done it, we couldn`t turn back the clock, and it`s given us masses of great material That will only really come into its own in series two. A brave decision that is paying off, in diamonds. You wait and see! 8. Time - how long typically does a costume take to make? Or a script to write? First draft script, nine or ten days; second draft two or three days more. So about two weeks in total. 9. What`s your favourite thing in the tribe you have contributed to and why? Too difficult a question. What do you like best? I like some of the intense emotional scenes I`ve helped create, because our young cast play them so well. Do you remember Trudy, desperately trying to get Bray to make a commitment to her? Or Salene confessing to Trudy she left her to die? I sat on my couch with a box of Kleenex! Being a teenager is a time of very intense emotions, both highs and lows, and I think our series reflects that brilliantly. Am I blowing our own trumpet too much? Maybe I`m just a teenager at heart.

10. Do you have any heroes or heroines in your field - if so, who are they? Anybody who can make a living and survive some of the appalling treatment That is often meted out to writers in television. And William Goldman, Woody Allen, and have you ever read David Mametıs screenplay of `Glengarry, Glenross`, or seen the film? Pure magic! 11. How did you get into your field? When you were younger, did you always want to do what you do today? Fifteen years jobbing in theatre as a stage manager, designer, director and, finally, a writer. What you might call an overnight success. I learnt what craft I have by reading, watching plays, films and, of course, television. But I`ve wanted to be a writer since I was ten and won second prize in a school essay competition. I wonder what the winner`s doing now? 12. What advice would you give to people who wanted to do what you do? Nowadays there are tons of media, film and writing courses for students, but There`s no substitute for having an instinct for drama. I`ve worked with too many script editors, in particular, who can spout all the current jargon about writing, but haven`t an ounce of dramatic feeling in their entire body. If you love drama, if you spend a lot of your days creating scenarios about your life (or other peoples`), most of which never turn out the way you had planned, then you probably have the instinct. From then on, it`s just hard work. Read a lot of plays and screenplays from Checkov to Tarantino. Watch a lot of films in particular. Talk about them with friends (and not just about how gorgeous Brad Pitt was!). That way, even if you donıt make it as a writer, you`ll have a lot of fun! Final word. If you haven`t got the skin of a rhinoceros, forget it. You`ll need that, and very good friends who don`t mind getting soggy shoulders on a regular basis. 13. Can you give any statistical or trivia facts about your role and Involvement? I tried to calculate once how many words I`d written as a writer and gave up. All I can say is, if I had a pound for every one of them, I`d finance the third series of `The Tribe` myself! The writing team are just itching to get into it. It`ll be sensational, or my name`s not `running wolf`. 14. What`s your favourite episode - or moment in the tribe - and why? Favourite episode? The next one. I can`t wait to find out what happens!