Twisting the Natural Hair of “Candyman” from Art Chic to Dark Terror

Can having great hair protect you from a monster in the mirror who cuts down his victims at the mention of his name a mere five times? There’s evidence in the new Candyman that it can. Department head hairstylist Jessi Dean stepped elegantly into the glossy art world of Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris). The killer begins as a mere myth, but hair and terror intertwine as the rumors prove true and the slayings mount.

“The Flight Attendant” Casting Directors on Booking HBO’s High-Flying Series

The Flight Attendant casting directors John Papsidera, Beth Bowling, and Kim Miscia had to book HBO Max’s hit series long before HBO Max was even a known quantity. Yet these veterans managed to fill The Flight Attendant‘s planeload of superb performers and earned an Emmy nomination for their efforts.

The Flight Attendant‘s cast delivers on the thrills, chills, laughs, and spills—the latter mostly via the drunken shenanigans of Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie Bowden.

“Untold: Breaking Point” Creators Examine Tennis Star Mardy Fish’s Battle With Severe Anxiety

Mardy Fish knows that he and others benefit when he tells his life story. Still, he’s not quite ready to watch someone else tell it for him.

Breaking Point — the latest installment in Netflix’s sports documentary series Untold, which will be released September 7 — recounts Fish’s descent from his perch as the No. 1 American tennis player in 2011 into a years-long battle with severe anxiety disorder.

Costume Designer Meghan Kasperlik on Capturing the Gritty Essence of “Mare of Easttown”

Costume designer Meghan Kasperlik did some serious fieldwork when she was preparing for HBO’s critical hit Mare of Easttown. One of her first research trips? To a Wawa in Coastville near where the series is set. The iconic chain is well known to residents of the greater Philadelphia area and southern New Jersey, and it proved an invaluable point of entry for Kasperlik to get a better sense of how the characters in Easttown would dress.

Emmy-Nominated “Mare of Easttown” Creator Brad Ingelsby on Bringing a Murder Mystery Home

The excitement was high in the Ingelsby house this past July 13. Like many in the television industry, writer/producer Brad Ingelsby and his family were watching this year’s Emmy nominations. He had good reason to tune in. Mare of Easttown, the HBO Max original series Ingelsby had created, had plenty of awards buzz. The series focuses on a somber small-town Pennsylvania detective (Kate Winslet) struggling with a deep personal loss as she works to unravel a murder mystery.

“Hacks” Editor Jessica Brunetto on Creating Comedic Rhythm

Editor Jessica Brunetto has been collaborating with Hacks creator Lucia Aniello for years now. Brunetto worked with Aniello on Time Traveling Bong in 2016, and from there, she jumped into the editing bay for seasons four and five of Broad City (Aniello directed 16 episodes of the critically acclaimed Comedy Central series). So when it was time for Aniello to find an editor for her new series Hacks,

Best of Summer: How the “A Quiet Place Part II” Sound Team Turns the Viewer Into Prey

This interview is part of our “Best of Summer” series. It was originally published on June 1. 

Don’t make a sound. The utterly frightening creatures of A Quiet Place are back in a terrifying sequel thirsty to tear your body apart. In this new chapter, the story picks up right where it left off with the Abbott family having destroyed their home in order to stay alive.

How “Candyman” Composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe Manipulated Madness Into Music

It’s hard to believe that someone as soft-spoken as Brooklyn musician Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe could be responsible for the dread-inducing soundscape that underscores the return of cinema’s most horrific throat-slashing boogeyman. And yet, that’s exactly what Lowe has achieved in his score for Candyman (opening Aug. 27). The film, from co-writer/director Nia DaCosta and co-writer/producer Jordan Peele, updates the original 1992 horror movie by tracking artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) as he tries to wrap his bee-stung arms around the mysterious re-emergence of the murderous Candyman in Chicago’s newly gentrified Cabrini Green neighborhood.

How Underwater Cinematographer Ian Seabrook Got The Shots in “Jungle Cruise”

Disney’s latest blockbuster based on a ride, director Jaume Collet-Serra’s Jungle Cruise, is a banter-filled romp down the Amazon. Blue-blooded adventurer Lily (Emily Blunt) drags her fusspot brother, MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), to South America in pursuit of the petals of an all-powerful healing tree. Their guiding trinket is an arrowhead, pilfered with great difficulty from a retrograde London men’s scientific society. Upon landing on the other side of the world, the pair wind up in the hands of riverboat captain Frank (Dwayne Johnson),

“Free Guy” Co-Writer Zak Penn on The Art of the Re-Write

Zak Penn started his career on a high note when he sold his first script at age 23 and landed Arnold Schwarzenegger as the star. The thrill didn’t last long. Last Action Hero got re-written, Penn was relegated to a “story by” credit and the would-be blockbuster flopped at the box office.

But Penn survived the ignominy and 28-years later, he’s become an expert at crafting tentpole action epics like The Incredible Hulk,

How the Emmy-Nominated “WandaVision” VFX Team Made Magic

Laden with special effects, big-name stars, and an audacious high concept, WandaVision represented a big swing for Marvel Studios when it debuted in January on Disney+. The bet paid off. Creator Jac Schaeffer’s series quickly became one of the season’s most talked-about new shows and it’s now validated all that buzz with a whopping 23 Emmy nominations. The hook? Superheroic witch Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and android Vision (Paul Bettany) disguise themselves as man and wife living sitcom-perfect lives in small-town New Jersey.

“Ted Lasso” Casting Director Theo Park on Filling Out AFC Richmond’s Roster

Who would have expected an earnest tale of an American football coach brought on to mind an English soccer team to be the pandemic’s breakout hit? Created by Jason Sudeikis, the titular star of Ted Lasso, the show’s joyful brand of storytelling is up for Emmy awards across the board.

Relentlessly upbeat, armed with a bottomless well of musical and literary trivia and a penchant for encouraging heart-to-hearts,

Tracey Scott Wilson on Penning the Queen of Soul’s Meteoric Rise in “Respect”

Writing a biopic is no easy task, particularly when the subject is an international icon who was a very private person. Indeed, crafting the screenplay for Respect, the highly anticipated drama chronicling Aretha Franklin’s rise from the church choir to the global stage, proved challenging, as well as rewarding, for Tracey Scott Wilson. But the fledgling feature film screenwriter, with an award-winning background in both theater and television (she co-executive produced Fosse/Verdon,

“The Suicide Squad” Production Designer Beth Mickle on Creating Gonzo Sets

James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is a film filled with highly ambitious, no-holds-barred set pieces, nearly all of which are done with practical effects. It’s a story that takes the characters into all kinds of physical environments as they work together to achieve their objective without dying in the process. Collaborating with Gunn to help make his vision a reality onscreen is production designer Beth Mickle. The Credits spoke with Mickle about how she got this high-profile gig,

Marlee Matlin on Her New Film “CODA” & Its Refreshing Focus on a Deaf Family

Marlee Matlin is unquestionably the best-known and most successful deaf actor working in American film and television. She exploded on the scene with her Oscar-winning performance as Sarah in the 1986 movie Children of a Lesser God and has worked steadily ever since. From her Emmy-nominated performances in Law and Order, The Practice, Seinfield, and Picket Fences to the memorable characters she created for The L Word,

Emmy-Nominee Hannah Waddingham on the Joy of Making “Ted Lasso”

Before Ted Lasso became a phenomenon, setting a record for most Emmy nominations by a freshman comedy (20 total, including seven for its actors), its virtues were spread, among my friends, more like a whisper campaign. One buddy in particular kept needling me via text. What finally broke me was the realization that here was my most sports-agnostic pal pressuring me to watch a show about an American football coach being hired to lead an English Premier League soccer team.

Sound Editor Trevor Gates on Keeping “Fear Street” Real, Upbeat, & Horrifying

Based on master of teen horror genre fiction R.L. Stine’s novels, Netflix released writer-director Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy over the past three successive Fridays. Opening with a neon-lit shopping mall murder spree, Part One – 1994 introduces the seemingly cursed teenaged residents of Shadyside and their luckier next-door neighbors in Sunnyvale. In Part Two – 1978, intrepid Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her nerdy younger brother,

Emmy-Nominated Composer Virginia Kilbertus on “Endings,” “The Lighthouse” & More

Composer Virginia Kilbertus was not entirely prepared for her Emmy nomination for outstanding music direction and composition for a daytime program. Although she’d submitted her work on Hulu’s Endings, a sci-fi adventure set in a near-future where four foster kids discover they’re not alone after the disappearance of the last elephant on Earth, she hadn’t been tracking the nominations since. “I hadn’t been anticipating when they were announcing it,” Kilbertus said by way of phone from Toronto.

“Loki” Makeup Department Head Douglas Noe on Designing Misfits & Minutemen

In ancient Norse mythology, Loki was a shape-shifting trickster inviting difficulty upon his companions as well as himself. In director Kate Herron’s new Disney+ series, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is true to his Norse roots. His journey begins with an arrest, having crossed a power-sapping organization called the Time Variance Authority. Loki is accused of being a variant, an offense that causes time-branching events that, to put it briefly, messes up the general order of things.

Documentarian Morgan Neville on “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain”

Charismatic author, chef, and world traveler Anthony Bourdain went from relative obscurity working in a New York restaurant to international success at the age of 43 when his memoir Kitchen Confidential was released. It started a meteoric rise to fame and led to Anthony Bourdain becoming a household name. When he killed himself at 61, his suicide shocked fans all over the world. Now Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville has created a fascinating, poignant portrait of the complicated man in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.