One of the most common jokes of the last, oh, five or so years has been that real life has become an episode of Black Mirror. The peerless series, created by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, depicts a future world in which technology has run amok, the worst people on the planet seem to amass the most power, and the very things we rely on to escape our relentless and terrifying reality end up swallowing us whole. There were whispers that because the world kept getting more Black Mirror-like since the show’s premiere way back in 2011 (originally on Channel 4 in the U.K.), Charlie Brooker, Jones, and the Black Mirror creative team felt no need to return to their landmark series. In fact, during the darkest days of the pandemic, Brooker told the U.K.’s Radio Times Magazinethat he wasn’t sure he could make another Black Mirror. “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those. I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”
Luckily, Varietyhas confirmed that’s not the case, as they’ve confirmed that Black Mirror is returning after a 3-year hiatus. Of course, we won’t know a thing about what the new episodes will explore, but Variety does report that season 6 will have more episodes than the shorter-than-usual season 5, which had only three. Those three episodes in season five were fantastic, however, and included great performances from stars Anthony Mackie and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the episode “Striking Vipers,” Topher Grace and Andrew Scott in “Smithereens,” and Miley Cyrus and Angourie Rice in “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too.”
Variety has a bit more to their scoop that adds to the intrigue—they’ve learned that season 6 will be “even more cinematic in scope, with each installment being treated as an individual film.” What’s made Black Mirror such unbelievable TV has been not only how eerily prescient it’s felt, but how exquisitely shot the show is. Sure, we’re living in this extended “Golden era” of TV, but Black Mirror has always been one of the best shows around, period.
Brooker and Jones had left their previous company, House of Tomorrow, which maintained rights over Black Mirror. Luckily for all involved, a deal has been worked out. Now it seems as if Black Mirror is returning, and perhaps—one can dream—the world it returns to will feel a little less like one of its episodes.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
The Predator franchise is getting a very compelling prequel.
The first trailer for director Dan Trachtenberg’s (10 Cloverfield Lane, The Boys) Predator sequel Prey is here, revealing a glimpse at how the cosmos’ most relentless Alpha Predator has been hunting on our planet for a long, long time. Prey is set in the Comanche Nation some 300 years ago and is centered on Naru (Amber Midthunder), a very skilled Comanche warrior who was taught by some of the Nation’s most revered hunters. As you’ve likely guessed by now, Naru’s skills will be put to the test when her camp is threatened by a hunter who exceeds even her abilities. Naru’s intent on protecting her people, but she’ll be pitted against a force unlike any she could possibly imagine.
Trachtenberg’s film comes from a script by Patrick Aison (Jack Ryan), and the production was committed to making sure their portrayal of the Comanche was accurate. A key to this effort was producer Jhane Myers, an acclaimed filmmaker and member of the Comanche nation, and the cast, along with Midthunder, is comprised entirely of Native and First Nation talent. This includes Dakota Beavers, Stormee Kipp, Julian Black Antelope, and Michelle Thrush.
Check out the trailer below. Prey begins its hunt on Hulu on August 5.
Here’s the official synopsis:
“Prey,” an all-new action-thriller from 20th Century Studios directed by Dan Trachtenberg (“The Boys,” “10 Cloverfield Lane”) and the newest entry in the “Predator” franchise, will stream August 5, 2022, exclusively on Hulu.
Set in the Comanche Nation 300 years ago, “Prey” is the story of a young woman, Naru, a fierce and highly skilled warrior. She has been raised in the shadow of some of the most legendary hunters who roam the Great Plains, so when danger threatens her camp, she sets out to protect her people. The prey she stalks, and ultimately confronts, turns out to be a highly evolved alien predator with a technically advanced arsenal, resulting in a vicious and terrifying showdown between the two adversaries.
“Prey” is directed by Dan Trachtenberg, written by Patrick Aison (“Jack Ryan,” “Treadstone”), and produced by John Davis (“Jungle Cruise,” “The Predator”) and Jhane Myers (“Monsters of God”), with Lawrence Gordon (“Watchmen”), Marty Ewing (“It: Chapter Two”), James E. Thomas, John C. Thomas and Marc Toberoff (“Fantasy Island”) serving as executive producers.
The filmmakers were committed to creating a film that provides an accurate portrayal of the Comanche and brings a level of authenticity that rings true to its Indigenous peoples. Myers, an acclaimed filmmaker, Sundance Fellow and member of the Comanche nation herself, is known for her attention and dedication to films surrounding the Comanche and Blackfeet nations and her passion for honoring the legacies of the Native communities. As a result, the film features a cast comprised almost entirely of Native and First Nation’s talent, including Amber Midthunder (“The Ice Road,” “Roswell, New Mexico”), newcomer Dakota Beavers, Stormee Kipp (“Sooyii”), Michelle Thrush (“The Journey Home”), Julian Black Antelope (“Tribal”).
For more on films and shows on Hulu, check out these stories:
We’ve got a fresh look at Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor.
Natalie Portman’s return to the Thor fold in Taika Waititi’s upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder as Jane Foster would have been exciting enough, but we’ve known since Comic-Con 2019 that Portman’s Foster would also be Mighty Thor. Here’s how Waititi revealed that bit of news way back when:
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 20: (L-R) President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, Director Taika Waititi, Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth of Marvel Studios’ ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ at the San Diego Comic-Con International 2019 Marvel Studios Panel in Hall H on July 20, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
Now, Marvel has revealed a new image of Portman as Mighty Thor, holding Mjolnir, the magical hammer we all know and love. Seeing Jane Foster as Mighty Thor certainly shocked regular old Thor (Chris Hemsworth, of course) in the first trailer for Love and Thunder, and we’re guessing it’ll take him most of the movie to get over it. In fact, Thor: Love and Thunder finds the God of Thunder in a reflective mood and on a new kind of quest—one to find inner peace. Yet we know that Thor will have to get into the action eventually, and thus he’s lured into yet another battle by a cosmic psychopath called Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) who plans on killing all the gods. In order to defeat Gorr, Thor will need his old pal Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Waititi himself), and, yes, Jane Foster.
In another new image, we see Thor definitely in battle mode as he dons his black armored chest plate, that lush fur cape, and Stormbreaker, his post-Mjolnir weapon. Thor: Love and Thunder is easily one of the most hotly-anticipated films in MCU’s Phase 4, and it’s the next one up, too. The cosmic action gets underway when Thor: Love and Thunder premieres on July 8.
Here’s the official synopsis for Thor: Love and Thunder:
Marvel Studios’ “Thor: Love and Thunder” finds the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) on a journey unlike anything he’s ever faced – a quest for inner peace. But Thor’s retirement is interrupted by a galactic killer known as Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who seeks the extinction of the gods. To combat the threat, Thor enlists the help of King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Taika Waititi) and ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who – to Thor’s surprise – inexplicably wields his magical hammer, Mjolnir, as the Mighty Thor. Together, they embark upon a harrowing cosmic adventure to uncover the mystery of the God Butcher’s vengeance and stop him before it’s too late. Directed by Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Jojo Rabbit”) and produced by Kevin Feige and Brad Winderbaum, “Thor: Love and Thunder” opens in U.S. theaters July 8, 2022.
For more on Thor: Love and Thunder, check out these stories:
*Big fat spoiler alert for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.*
Have you seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness? Good, that means you can follow us through this portal into a universe where we can discuss the film’s epic mid-credits reveal. But first, a word about director Sam Raimi, who has returned to superhero moviemaking after his game-changing, early aughts Spider-Man trilogy with a bang here, delivering a Marvel movie unlike any we’ve seen before. Yes, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness connects directly to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yes, the movie delivers the witty one-liners, the spectacle, and the CGI wizardry we’ve come to expect, but it feels decidedly like a Sam Raimi movie. There’s a ringing horror element that runs through the whole movie, highlighted when Doctor Strange has to embody his own corpse from another universe to save the day. Yet if there was one moment that was true to the Marvel formula, it was the big reveal during the mid-credits scene. And that reveal, you know, was massive—Charlize Theron has joined the MCU.
In a video Theron posted to Twitter, Theron takes us behind the scenes to have a quick look at the creation of her character, Clea. The mid-credits scene only offers us a few clues as to who Theron is, but a dip into the comics reveals more. Clea is one of Doctor Strange’s students. She’s also a romantic partner (she eventually marries him in the comics), and, in one of the multiverses, she’s the Sorceress Supreme. In the mid-credits scene, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, obviously) is walking through New York when he’s stopped by Clea. She tells him he’s caused an incursion for all his multiverse-meddling, and she needs him to come with her to fix it. Then she slices a fat hole in the universe, exposing the Dark Dimension that was revealed back in 2016’s Doctor Strange. Naturally, Doctor Strange joins her immediately and they hop through the portal and off for a fresh adventure.
Theron had first revealed that she’d joined the MCU as Clea back on May 10, four days after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness premiered:
Clea is a powerful sorceress, but her outfit also appears much more sturdy and armored than what we see Doctor Strange typically wearing. How many battles has Clea faced? But then, the purple cape, along with the purple eyeshadow, definitely gives off a Sorceress Supreme vibe. The big question now is, when will see Theron’s Clea in real action in an MCU movie? The answer, of course, remains a secret, but you don’t introduce a star as big as Theron without having grand plans for her.
For more on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, check out these stories:
Featured image: LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 02: Charlize Theron attend the EE British Academy Film Awards 2020 After Party at The Grosvenor House Hotel on February 02, 2020 in London, England. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)
Moon Knight was a particularly intriguing challenge for costume designer Meghan Kasperlik. Coming off an incredible piece of work with her designs for the gritty crime series Mare of Easttown on HBO, where Kasperlik was key to helping Kate Winslet fully embody a detective in Delaware County, Pennsylvania (as a DelCo native, I remain amazed by this series on every level), Kasperlik plunged into the realm of superheroes, Egyptian mythology, and the massive Marvel Cinematic Universe with Moon Knight.
Yet the series, which just finished its six-episode run on Disney+, offered unique challenges for a Marvel project. For the first time in a Disney+ Marvel series, Moon Knight would feature a character not seen before in an MCU film. Oscar Isaac does double duty in the series, starring as a fidgety museum gift shop employee named Steven Grant who happens to also be Marc Spector, an American mercenary who works at the behest of the Egyptian God Khonoshu. Marc Spector then takes on the superheroic persona—and super-suit—of the titular Moon Knight.
The challenges for Steven and Marc—reconciling their clashing personalities, dealing with a very demanding Egyptian God, trying to wrest control of their body from the other—increase tenfold when Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) shows up determined to dispatch them while he completes a quest to release the Goddess Ammit. Harrow’s reasoning? Through Ammit, he will be able to cleanse the planet of all evil-doers (or so he claims), based on a questionable calculus that goes by another name—mass murder.
We spoke to Kasperlik about jumping into the Marvel fray, designing Moon Knight’s costume, and how she handled creating the looks for a talking hippotamus who also happens to be the Goddess Tawaret.
So talk to me about plunging into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and doing so with a brand new character.
I’ve been wanting to work with Marvel for a while now. Creatively, you get to do some really amazing things. But I always like to do my own take on it, I like to be very involved from the beginning. So it was really great that my first venture into Marvel happens to be one where we’ve never met this person in the MCU on screen before. When I heard it was Oscar, that was just a no-brainer. Also, I’ve worked with cinematographer Greg Middleton before—we did Watchmen together.
We used the comics, but I didn’t go as heavy into the comic as I did with Watchmen, because the graphic novel was really Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof’s Bible. For Moon Knight, we referenced the comics, but we were also asking ourselves, ‘How do we take it to the next level? How do we bring these two-dimensional characters to life?’ What helps is that Oscar’s performance is just phenomenal throughout. So it was like, I need costumes to work with that. How can my work be up to that level?
Oscar Isaac is Marc Spector/Moon Knight in Marvel’s “Moon Knight.” Courtesy Marvel Studios/Disney+.
I imagine designing for Oscar’s character must’ve been a lot of fun because he plays essentially three people. He’s a nervous Brit as Steven Grant, a no-nonsense American mercenary as Marc Spector, and a superhero as Moon Knight.
So we started off with Steven, who was in Brixton, in London. That’s kind of a cooler area, but obviously, Steven is not super cool. So in the London scenes, we have Oscar in baggier pants and clunkier shoes. You really saw the transformation into Steven happening with Oscar. I could see it happening in the fitting. But there are hints of Marc and Moon Knight in Steven’s clothes. For example, his socks might look white, but they’re actually cool gray socks, which is a nod to the Moon Knight character. And then with Marc, he needed to blend in. I didn’t want the clothes to be as stylish, because Oscar has a friend that does Special Ops and he was telling me that when a person is a mercenary, they need to blend in.
So one interesting aspect is, that you actually don’t put a mercenary in black because you will notice black, so you put them in tans, browns, and charcoal grays because that blends into a crowd. So we have Marc in this brown jacket when we first see him. Then I also put him in a light gray hoodie as an ode to Moon Knight, too.
How did you go about designing the Moon Knight super-suit? It has a mummified wrapping element, a cloak, and so many more little details.
Marvel has a great development team that starts the process. Oscar wanted to have a very strong presence in the suit. So there were some alterations to the mummy wrappings. I love a lot of texture in my designs. So there are multiple layers of 3D printed textures on the Moon Knight suit, there were 803 individual pieces on it, with a lot of patterning and a lot of cutting. Not to mention the crest, which is partly inspired by the God Khonshu. And then underneath the lining of the cape, there are hieroglyphics—those are Khonshu’s oath of vengeance. Moon Knight is kind of like this substantiation of this God. They’re mirrored in ways. So there are lots of different elements in that suit that equate to a new kind of superhero.
And what about the color of Moon Knight’s super-suit?
In the comic, Moon Knight says something like, ‘I wear white, so you can see me coming.’ So we did that, while still keeping a little bit of the little gray and making it a little dingier, but you can still see him.
What about when Steven is inhabiting the Moon Knight suit and becomes Mr. Knight, and instead of the caped super-suit, it’s a literal suit?
It’s a white three-piece suit in the comics, and coming in I was slightly terrified because a white three-piece suit can go very wrong, like you’re suddenly in a wedding singer scenario. So that was another suit that I wanted to make sure had a lot of texture because I knew we would be filming outside, and I didn’t want when the light that hits it to go flat. So the fabric is actually white, it’s an upholstery fabric that has some texture. And then it has a little silver thread throughout so that when the light hits it, it’ll help bounce it off in a way that like gives it a little shimmer. Then the lapels are similar to what Khonshu wears on his chest. Khonshu has these like leather straps that criss-cross his chest, like bandoliers, and the print on the lapels of the Mr. Knight suit are like those bandoliers. Also, the buttons on the waistcoat are Khonshu’s symbol. I had an in-house metalsmith working on multiple things, and one of them was the buttons. He made more than 200. I mean, the level of detail is, is astonishing.
How much input do you have when the character is largely computer-generated, like Khonshu or Tawaret (Antonia Salib), a Goddess who takes the form of a talking hippo?
All of the CG characters in the show are fully made costumes that were worn on set. With Tawaret, the hippo, I had a metalsmith who made her headpiece, this crown which means mother and birth. Then there are hieroglyphics on her costume, there’s a handmade beetle on her chest, and there’s her jewelry, like the rings she wears and her bracelets. So everything was completely constructed and made, and Tawaret’s episode was a bit more playful and fun, and definitely the most colorful episode.
Then there’s the villain, Arthur Harrow, played by Ethan Hawke. I’ve read that he was modeled a bit on the Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh?
I spoke to Ethan at length about the character. We had really great conversations. Sometimes actors come in and you just start the fitting and talk while you’re doing it. Ethan and I had like a really good sit-down for probably an hour and a half, two hours, to really discuss who this character is and where we wanted to go. I sent him over renderings of like my thoughts, and we talked about Arthur Harrow, who’s a cult leader, but he’s a part of the people, he brought in like the monk-like thing. We did talk about David Koresh, and about cult leaders in general, and often they dress very simply. They’re very plain, but they might have an interesting haircut or they wear glasses or, in Arthur Harrow’s case, have a cane. So we went with these Monk-like linen clothes. We knew he’d be going to the desert, so we kept it simple. But if you go back and re-watch, you’ll see we have a few different shapes and a few different colors.
Those were my idea. I wanted to bring in a weird element, those sandals are a little clunky and unexpected. He also wears bracelets that you don’t see very much, but they’ve got engravings that are like the Death Prayer Book.
Finally, May Calamawy’s Layla El-Fouly is a badass, a romantic interest, and by the end, a superhero in her own right. How did you approach her look?
Yeah. So Mohammed Diab, our director, had a very strong request of wanting to show Egyptian women in a powerful way. In our story, Layla has lived in London for a while, but even though she’s left Egypt, she still has that culture, while she made her life in London. So it’s a mix of both cultures while being a badass. I wanted to make her a little bit sporty, but not in a stereotypical way with the leather jacket and tight jeans. We’ve seen that a lot. So I brought in a little color and played with texture and pattern. I just wanted her look to have a different feel than maybe some other action women that we’ve seen. And May is lovely and amazing, so it was really exciting to build a character with her.
The shadowy figure who sent House Atreides to their doom in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune? Yeah, it was Christopher Walken.
The legendary Walken is joining Denis Villeneuve’s eagerly-anticipated sequel, making him the third big name to round out the cast alongside Florence Pugh and Austin Butler. Walken’s not just joining the cast, he’s playing the major role of Emperor Shaddum IV, the prime mover in the Galactic power struggle at the heart of Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic.
The role of the Emperor was the last, big missing piece for Villeneuve, having already found his Princess Irulan Corrino in Pugh and his Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Butler. The cast already includes Timothée Chalamet as young hero Paul Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson as his mother, Lady Jessica, Zendaya as the Fremen Chani, Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, and Javier Bardem as the Fremen Stilgar.
Emperor Shaddum IV was the unseen ruler in the first part of Dune who sent House Atreides, led by Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) to Arrakis to take over the spice trade from House Harkonnen. We learned in Part One (as readers of the book already knew, of course) that this was a set-up. House Harkonnen attacked and obliterated much of House Atreides, including Duke Leto, casting off Paul and Lady Jessica into the desert in a desperate attempt to survive and, if possible, plot their revenge. In Part Two, both the Emperor and his number two, the Baron, brutally lord over the remaining population of Arrakis—but a rebellion is brewing. Readers of the book and viewers of David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation also know that a big showdown is set for Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. But the figure pulling all the strings is the Emperor, and you couldn’t do much better than Walken for the role.
Filming on Part Two is set to begin this summer in Budapest.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 16: Christopher Walken attends the “The Family Fang” Premiere – 2016 Tribeca Film Festival at BMCC John Zuccotti Theater on April 16, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
Netflix is taking you to Raccoon City, possibly the worst city in the world, via a trailer for their new live-action series based on the mega-popular video game series.
Resident Evil will follow the travails of Jade Wesker (Tamara Smart), and you Resident Evil fans will recognize that last name, as Jade is the daughter of the villain Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick). The series is set between the years 2022 and 2036, tracking Jade and her sister Billie (Siena Agudong) in 2022 as they move with their family to Raccoon City (why? why?) and eventually start to uncover the truth about their father. To be fair, in 2022, Raccoon City seems like a nice place to live, if your thing is a spick-and-span blandness that screams future dystopia. You know what definitely screams future dystopia? A shot of two viles in a laboratory that have Jade and Billie’s names on them—uh oh.
The 2036 portions of the series will find Jade in dire straits, trying to make it in a zombie-ravaged world thanks to the Umbrella Corp’s T-Virus. Making matters even worse for Jade is her sister Billie’s gone, and she wants answers.
We’ve obviously been to Raccoon City before via the six-film series directed by Paul W.S. Anderson that starred Milla Jovovich, as well as director Johannes Roberts’ stand-alone film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021. Then there’s the animated series Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness that’s also on Netflix. Yet this particular Resident Evil has the distinction of being the first live-action series in the zombie franchise.
Joining Agudong, Reddick, and Smart are Ella Balinska, Paola Nuñez, and Adeline Rudolph.
Check out the trailer below. Resident Evil hits Netflix on July 14.
Here’s the official synopsis:
14 years after Joy caused so much pain, Jade Wesker fights for survival in a world overrun by the blood-thirsty infected and mind-shattering creatures. In this absolute carnage, Jade is haunted by her past in New Raccoon City, by her father’s chilling connections to the sinister Umbrella Corporation but mostly by what happened to her sister, Billie.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Here we are, 36-years after the original Top Gun, and Tom Cruise is back in the cockpit and going Mach 4 with his hair on fire again. Cruise, director Joseph Kosinski (they teamed up on the sci-fi film Oblivion), and their cast and crew have delivered one of the best action movies in years. Top Gun: Maverick manages the tricky feat of retaining what made the original so iconic while achieving newfound emotions, depth, and even more death-defying aerial feats. As the reviews are flying in, there is a consistent theme—this film is not just a ripping good time, it’s also a surprisingly emotional, old-fashioned action blockbuster made with impeccable craft. Also, and this is never easy, critics are pointing out an absolutely fantastic third act.
Let’s quickly situate ourselves with the story before moving onto the rave reviews. Top Gun: Maverick finds Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise, obviously) being summoned back to the Navy to help school a new class of Top Gun pilots before a top-secret, seriously dangerous mission. Yet Maverick’s return is complicated by his past—one of his students is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Top Gun‘s Goose (Anthony Edwards), Mav’s best friend and former radar intercept officer who died during a tragic accident during a training mission that has haunted Mav ever since.
And who summoned Mav back into the Navy fold? One Admiral Kazansky, who you remember from the original film from his call sign—Iceman. Yup, Val Kilmer returns for a moving scene in Maverick, and it’s but one of the resonances from the original that helps give Maverick its emotional heft. New cast members include Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Monica Barbaro, and Greg Tarzan Davis.
Top Gun: Maverick his theaters on May 27.
Onto the reviews!
#TopGunMaverick is a stunning sequel. Hardly anything in it will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do. Our review: https://t.co/CkZn9jigdE
#TopGunMaverick has stronger internal & external conflicts than the original, but honors, blending past & present into a poignant, powerful thrill ride. Kosinski doesn’t emulate Scott, but he innovates & evolves. INCREDIBLE flight & dogfight sequences. Tom Cruise, terrific. pic.twitter.com/WOtvvAupyO
Yes I’m gonna say it and I don’t care who disagrees. #Topgun#TopGunMaverick is a perfect movie. They don’t make movies like that anymore. You wait and see. Your expectations of this movie should be higher than you think. pic.twitter.com/kQ4ecLsLQG
— Kristian Harloff (@KristianHarloff) May 10, 2022
#TopGunMaverick is pure movie magic. It brings us back to another era of blockbusters. Absolutely stunning flight sequences and an emotional core that resonates. See it in IMAX. pic.twitter.com/aDpjyrFlfm
The single greatest thing about the stratospherically spectacular #TopGunMaverick? The sheer love & utter reverence it has for its predecessor, credit Joseph Kosinski for delivering the single best film of ‘22, what an absolute GRAND SLAM Paramount has on its hands, straight FIRE pic.twitter.com/KKhCx1FKhR
#TopGunMaverick took my breathe away! An adrenaline rush tailor made for the summer blockbuster season. Not only does it give cinephiles jaw dropping aerial combat sequences, but packs an unexpected amount of emotion that will surely surprise many. 80s nostalgia done right! pic.twitter.com/CqpzuxR5Oq
Yes, #TopGunMaverick is a really entertaining movie. But it’s also maybe the most personal thing Tom Cruise has ever made? It’s all one big metaphor for Tom Cruise’s career and his vision of what movies should be. https://t.co/S7KQR2oN6R
Directed by Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is back in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and he and Supreme Sorcerer Wong (Benedict Wong) speedily land an unexpected assignment — protect America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenage multiverse-traveler who can’t control her world-hopping powers. To keep his charge safe, Stephen turns to Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who turns out to be living not in an apple orchard, busily mothering her twin boys, but in a barren land, population: 1, the Scarlet Witch. For Wanda, the only way back to Billy and Tommy, the boys she created in Westview, is to another universe where they still exist — but traveling between worlds is a talent she needs to take from America, first.
The action takes off across the multiverse, with America and her helpers and pursuer alike landing in alternate worlds where they contend with challenges ranging from the mundane (red means go, pizza comes in ball form) to the existential, up to and including death. And poor Strange can’t seem to land his love, Christine (Rachel McAdams) in any world, with the additional bad luck of encountering different versions of his personal enemies who remain embittered with the doctor across universes.
In terms of costumes, Strange is fairly consistent, even across several different worlds’ worth of Stephens. His enchanted cloak is back, of course. America, we are reminded by both her consistent teenager appearance and love of pizza, is but an adolescent, even if she holds one of the rarest powers in the multiverse. We see the most variety from the multitude of Wandas, who swing wildly from an athleisure-clad suburban mom to the slick and sinister-gowned Scarlett Witch. For costume designer Graham Churchyard, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was both a continuation of a world in which he’s spent many years — this is his sixth Marvel film — and a totally new assignment. “I’ve been quite happy for years being the guy in the workshop making all these supersuits, and then just kind of put my neck forward,” he said of his extensive resume prior to signing on with Multiverse of Madness as the film’s costume designer (he credits producer Eric Carroll for putting his name forward and his wife for pushing him to do it). We got to speak with him about landing the job, bringing the film’s repeat characters into new versions of their various worlds, and marrying physical costumes with their VFX counterparts.
So this was a very new experience.
Kevin Feige and Lou D’Esposito [both producers] had tried to promote me before, about six years ago, and that didn’t work out. I was a bit crestfallen, but I thought okay, I’ll go back to my job on Justice League, or whatever I was doing next. But it’s been absolutely amazing. Victoria [Alonso], Lou [D’Esposito], and Kevin [Feige] are just such amazing people to work for. And the visual department, they’re set up in such a way that I’m not saying it makes it easy, but they have a system. And because they’ve known me for so long, they trusted me to get on with stuff.
Elizabeth Olsen in in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Courtesy Marvel Studios.
How did you approach a character like Wanda, aka theScarlet Witch, whose looks vary so much and whom we’ve seen elsewhere recently?
After WandaVision, part of the story is that she’s now gotten the Darkhold, is creating these hexes, and her character is moving on, as it were. So they wanted to get away from the last frames you saw of WandaVision, of something that looked more superhero and more like the comics, into another version that was a little more sinister. So I made some changes there in the crown. The tiara has this undefinable material. You’re not quite sure if it’s a jewel-like precious stone or something unknown, but it has this kind of deterioration on it. And the whole of her costume has this deteriorated effect. I was really happy with the way that worked out because we took the WandaVision costume but we cast it in clear tinted material. So when she’s flying around, backlit, and in the seance, you actually really see that the material of her costume has a jewel-like and translucent quality, which changes depending on the angle. And then I gave her sleeves, wanting to move away from the cold shoulder look. It gave her more of a unified look in a silhouette.
How did you develop what America should be wearing? Her costume winds up having to do a lot of work.
Now I can’t remember whether the jean jacket with the star on the back was actually scripted. I probably did about 40 illustrations for that, all with different back designs which were part of Mexican folklore, just to keep her heritage within Mexican culture. But in fact, there’s a bit of a mix-up, there are some Portuguese witchcraft symbols in there, too. The denim jacket is an idea that’s been around in fashion for a long time and then some emo kids, if you like, will write some poetry on it, or a slogan, or just personalize their own jacket. In one of the scripts, she was an orphan in an orphanage, and it felt like she’d be in her bedroom decorating this coat just to get out some of the angst at the way she’d had to survive for the last 14 years, being hustled around different universes. So that expressive poetry on there came out of her background. It’s all in Spanish and it all means something. If you saw it in close detail, people would recognize a lot of expressions there. I tried many things. I tried a camouflage that was red, white, and blue but mashed up, keeping America from the comics and the American flag, and blending that with Mexican folk art was where we got to.
I think, in the end, the denim jacket was more youthful, with the black jeans and high-top sneakers. It was just a better launch for her into the multiverse, at age 14, rather than some of the comic images. We didn’t particularly want to introduce anything that was too adult. We wanted to keep her in that early teens look. But it was also a very functional garment. There were many designs on the back and there were many discussions about how she would create these star portals when she had no control over them. So the star on the back became more significant. When she’s running down the street, at the opening when she first meets Strange, you just see this white star running down the street, so you don’t lose her in the crowd.
Xochitl Gomez in in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Courtesy Marvel Studios.
What kind of research do you do going in, particularly related to the dojo-type setting and Wong’s character?
I certainly looked at what other people had done. Everything from samurai movies to any kind of Eastern culture. The vibe was set up in the first film. It was sportswear mixed with kimono styles. So just taking that one stage further — they wanted to upgrade Wong. I know he’s in almost every Marvel production made now, but they wanted to move him on. Because this film was a bit more fight- and battle-oriented, when Wong first arrives in the street, he has elements of kendo armor on his legs, and he’s wearing a very elaborate and embroidered garment, but the essence of it was to keep it a practical battle look. So his costume goes back to Imperial China, but still keeping the signature Wong colors that were set up in the first film, the purples and indigos. It was Sam’s idea to introduce the gold color. It worked. The deeper you look into that costume, the leather belt he wears is remarkably detailed, hand-tooled leather designed with serpents and dragons. We designed the rope dart which he uses several times. I wanted it to almost be like a Marvel comic relic, like Wong’s staff. In the first film, in the sanctum, they had these relics, which include the Cloak of Levitation. I just like to think that the rope dart that I designed was sort of a magical relic. It’s like a sort of physical taser, like an arrowhead on a ribbon, and it’s used in martial arts. It can be thrown and retrieved and hit enemies, and then rather than just staying out there like an arrowhead, you can retrieve it. It goes back to Chinese martial arts weaponry.
Starting with Strange’s cloak, is there a close collaboration between your department and the VFX team?
Doctor Strange’s cloak is quite often more physical than you realize. Because VFX is sort of on a budget, they like to leave it in as long as possible before it needs to take on some sort of personality. We have a shortie version which he wears when there are fights going on and then the rest of it is CG after that. Quite a lot of the time it’s really there as a physical thing. It was made on the first Doctor Strange, and then on this, we made ten more. He’s had six physical appearances in this costume, so we needed to not only upgrade his costume from a disciple to a master’s costume but we remade the cloaks. They were one of the most complicated things I’ve ever made. The design was worked out by Alexandra Byrne on the first movie with the director, and they arrived at that asymmetric, amazing piece of costume. But I’m used to working in my own capacity very closely with visual effects because you have to do all kinds of trick costumes to make them work for the stunts, special effects, and visual effects. So when the audience thinks, for example, on Avengers: Age of Ultron, there might be one or two Black Widow costumes, one or two Captain Americas, we made 20 repeats of each of those, and they are phenomenally complicated and usually take about a week [each]. The hours are just enormous. So Janek Sirrs, the remarkable visual effects producer, we had a lot of shortcuts. The visual effects results in this film are quite remarkable. And to John Mathieson [cinematographer] and Janek, I’d just like to say thank you for making me look so good. John’s lighting is remarkable and the intermeshing of all the visual effects just makes it look like everything is real, all the time. It’s very important to get that balance, in that relationship with the cinematographer and visual effects.
Benedict Cumberbatch in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.”
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is in theaters now.
For more on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, check out these stories:
Writer Ben Macintyre’s book “Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory” lives up to its subtitle. The bizarre plan in question would barely be credible as the plot of a movie, let alone an actual piece of espionage history that really and truly did fool the Nazis and make an Allied victory possible. A sketch of that plan—doctor up a corpse to make it look like a high ranking British officer, fill in his backstory (photo of his sweetheart, proper credentials, etc.), and include detailed plans about a British attack on Nazi positions in Europe via Greece, and hope, against all odds, the Nazis fall for it and divert their resources from Sicily, the actual location of the Allied invasion. The number of things that had to go right for this ploy to work was astonishing, and as even a D-student of history knows, the Allied forces won the war, so the ploy, incredibly, worked.
You couldn’t read Macintyre’s book without telling yourself this should be a movie, especially when you learn that one of the scheme’s architects was a young Lieutenant Commander named Ian Fleming. (Yes, that Ian Fleming). And twelve years after its publication, director John Madden has delivered a riveting adaptation of a story with more moving parts than an amphibious assault.
Considered the greatest single deception in the history of espionage, the events surrounding Operation Mincemeat have been parlayed into a film before, director Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was (1956), yet it’s fair to say Madden’s Operation Mincemeat, premiering today on Netflix, will likely be the definitive cinematic version. Working off a nimble script from Michelle Ashford, Madden has marshaled a stellar cast of performers, including Colin Firth as the operation’s chief Ewen Montagu (who went on a to write a history of the operation in 1953 that was the basis for the 1956 film), Matthew Macfadyen as his brilliant number two Charles Cholmondeley, Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming, Kelly Macdonald as a crucial member of their team, Jean Leslie, and Jason Isaacs as the operation’s official Doubting Thomas, Admiral John Godfrey.
We spoke to Madden about the risks and rewards of adapting Macintyre’s book, and why Operation Mincemeat had to be more than just a spy thriller.
How did you first come to Ben Macintyre’s book?
I was aware of the story, you know, in a kind of urban myth way. When I was growing up we had the original account of it from Ewen Montague’s book, “The Man Who Never Was,” which became a film in 1956. I was too young to see that, but I remembered a dim sense of the story and what it was about simply because once you hear about the dead body, it sticks in your head. Then I was working with Michelle Ashford on a pilot for a series about the sex researchers, Masters and Johnson, and she had just stumbled on Ben Macintyre’s book. She was just sort of gobsmacked by it. She gave it to me and said she thought she had a hunch about a way into this book as a film.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Lorne Macfadyen as Glyndwr Michael, Paul Ritter as Bentley Purchase, Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley and Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
The story Macintyre tells is just so unbelievable, and it does feel like begs to be a movie, but then again, it’s incredibly complex. How did you turn this massive, intricately plotted deception into a cohesive, compelling film?
When I read it, I thought, ‘How on earth do you corral this extraordinary story into a shape that has the specific gravity of a film?’ There were several things that Michelle and I both jumped at. One was the sort of thematic idea that it’s a story about telling stories. It’s about fiction and reality and how you mediate reality by telling stories about it. Then, it happened to be peopled with novelistically inclined characters left, right, and center, with the most extraordinary one in the middle of it, Ian Fleming, who was 10 years away from writing “Casino Royale” at the time. But much more than that, I was amazed at how you were grabbed emotionally by this story.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Director John Madden behind the scenes of Operation Mincemeat. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
It seems rare for a spy thriller to be so concerned with the emotional landscape of its central characters.
The circumstances here were interesting—the people who actually created the deception were not professional spies. They were highly intelligent people who gravitated towards the intelligence effort during the war. Many of them were very eccentric, like Charles Cholmondeley (Macfayden), and they were plunged into this improbable undertaking, which I think initially they sort of jumped at because it seemed like an idea that worked in fiction.
Yes, that’s another incredible true fact—they lifted their idea of planting a corpse with fake papers from a novel!
It was all borrowed from the book “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” by Basil Thompson. And then they started to take very seriously the idea that could this be made to work. They invested more of themselves in it until eventually, they became lost.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Colin Firth, Johnny Flynn and Matthew Macfadyen behind the scenes of Operation Mincemeat. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
We watch as Firth’s Ewen Montagu and Macfayden’s Charles Cholmondeley, the chief drivers of the deception, start to unravel. How did you go about framing that?
They disappeared into their own fiction to a degree emotionally, and that was the point of entry for Michelle and me. I didn’t think you could tell the story unless you could involve the audience emotionally, because if it just became like a sort of parade of Monte Python sketches, that might not result in something that gave you a film that evolved into something much more powerful in the end, because it’s a big story with huge stakes.
The stakes are hundreds of thousands of human lives and the fate of the free world, more or less.
Yes, and I think at the point that those stakes really finally settle on the shoulders of the creators of this fiction, it becomes almost unbearable because of the risk that their deception could have the exact opposite effect that they wanted.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) James Fleet as Charles Fraser-Smith, Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
It’s a spy thriller, but also a war film, and then it’s also got hints of a romantic triangle—how did you meld those genres?
Emotionally it’s tonally varied. I love those kinds of films that you have to kind of navigate shifts in tone that are sometimes very funny and absurd. Then it becomes something else and the characters don’t realize what’s happening to them. I feel this is true of any film, particularly a film like this, that if it’s just a dry procedural, even one this crazy and bizarre, it will only keep you engaged at a certain level. On one level it’s a war film, the world of bombs and bullets on the battlefield and the brutalities and the heroism, and on the other hand, it’s about the corridors of power. But our film occupies a very unique space in the middle because the plan itself becomes shaped by the people who are creating it, who then become unable to control what it is that they’ve created. The whole thing depends on a body that you float across a piece of water.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022) Colin Firth and Kelly Macdonald behind the scenes of Operation Mincemeat. Cr: Giles Keyte/Courtesy See-Saw Films and Netflix
This is where Operation Mincemeat turns again—it’s hard enough to launch this mission, and then when it is launched, it’s a terrifying waiting game of, ‘will it work?’
Yes, how do you deal with the third act? Because you know, two acts are certainly going to be the time you need to develop the deception and making that real. And then the body is launched and now the story has to go somewhere else because the characters that we’ve been following are completely separated from the story that unfolds.
So how’d you solve that third act problem?
Michelle and I were talking and we thought, at that point, it should flip on its head. The story then becomes about how our characters are assaulted by doubt, how dread takes over, and with very good reason because they can’t actually tell whether the body has hit the target that they want. And when the body does land in Spain as intended, it becomes about who’s bluffing and who’s double bluffing? Have the Germans swallowed the deception, or, have they figured it out and are now playing a disinformation strategy back at the Allies? And then the film becomes existential almost and moves into the terrain of a thriller, with the terror of this situation where countless hundreds of thousands of people might be literally marching into their deaths.
It’s amazing that once the body lands in Spain, we meet the British officers stationed there who have to continue to sell the fiction to the authorities there, both Spanish and Nazis because this feels like it could be its own movie. These characters are also so compelling.
Yes, by the time the body is actually in Cadiz, it’s so fascinating. And every new character could be the protagonist of a movie. It’s very unusual story in that respect, the fact that every character who walks into the movie sort of holds the story in their hands at a certain point.
Operation Mincemeat is available to stream on Netflix.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Featured image: OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2022), Colin Firth as Ewen Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley. Cr: Giles Keyte/See-Saw Films, Courtesy of Netflix
When Tom Cruise landed a helicopter on the USS Midway aircraft carrier in San Diego for the world premiere of Top Gun: Maverick, he was putting perhaps the perfect final touch on an epic story of movie-making magic. It’s been 35-years since we last saw Cruise play Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in director Tony Scott’s Top Gun, but Cruise’s return, after an inspired pitch by Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, blew away audiences in both San Diego and Las Vegas, where Paramount debuted the film at CinemaCon. The story of how Top Gun: Maverick came to be, what it required, and what it brought to California’s economy are all nearly as stunning as the aerial maneuvers on display in the film.
The first step was that pitch from Kosinski, who got into a room with Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to tell them his vision for a Top Gun sequel. As The Hollywood Reporterreveals, Kosinski came prepared with a fleshed-out story, a poster, and a lookbook. “After he finished pitching it, Tom pulled out his phone and called Paramount and said, ‘I’m making another Top Gun movie,’” Bruckheimer told The Hollywood Reporter.
Of course, this is just the very beginning—the pre-production process included fine-tuning a script that saw Maverick returning to the Navy after a request by a certain Admiral Kazansky (better known as Iceman, played by Val Kilmer, in the original Top Gun), to help train a crop of new Top Guns for a top-secret and highly dangerous new mission. One of those Top Guns is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Goose (Anthony Edwards), Maverick’s best friend and radar intercept officer who died during one of Maverick’s training flights in the original Top Gun. In this way, Maverick has to face his past while helping these young hotshot pilots, a breed he knows a few things about, for a mission unlike any other before.
Production in California was, in a word, epic. The aerial action was real and required Kosinski to film more than 800 hours of footage. As we wrote back in 2018, Top Gun: Maverick deployed real Navy jets and aviators. “Much like the first film, these are going to be real jets and real U.S. Naval aviators flying in these scenes,” Naval Air Forces spokesman Commander Ronald Flanders told us. “We’re excited about it.”
As always, Cruise was adamant that the case train hard and do as many of their own stunts as possible. That included two hours of swimming and two hours of flying a day. Cruise also helped train the crew on the camera equipment, as the actors were often required to work the cameras while in the cockpit. “We had to teach the actors about lighting, about cinematography, about editing,” Cruise told Empire Magazine. “I had to teach them how to turn the cameras on and off, and about camera angles and lenses. We didn’t have unlimited time in these jets. If they were going up for 20-30 minutes, I had to make sure that we got what we needed.”
As for the economic impact that Top Gun: Maverick made on California, the proof is in the numbers. The production added $150 million to the local economy and created 2,820 jobs for Californians. When a production as massive as this comes to town, that means millions of dollars are not only poured into the economy via wages ($80 million worth here), but also in rentals, purchases, and supplies to build and dress sets ($6.7 million), in lodging ($3.9 million), transportation ($2 million), catering ($1.4 million), and hardware and lumber supplies ($1.2 million). Big movie, big impact.
Joining Cruise, Kilmer, and Powell in the cast are Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Monica Barbaro, and Greg Tarzan Davis. And don’t worry, if you’re a Top Gun fan and wondering whether Top Gun: Maverick will reproduce one of those most iconic scenes from the original, you won’t be disappointed. There is a beach volleyball scene, and according to castmember Jay Ellis, it required so much baby oil that lighting a match near the cast could have been dangerous.
Top Gun: Maverick zooms into theaters on May 27.
For more on Top Gun: Maverick, check out these stories:
It seems safe to say that despite a 13-year gap between James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar and his long-awaited sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, interest remains as huge as a tidal wave. The first teaser trailer The Way of Water, which played first exclusively in theaters before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness before heading online, was viewed 148.6 million times in its first 24 hours. That’s a ton of eyeballs, folks.
To give you a bit of perspective on how that compares to other recent massive films, consider the only recent teaser to best The Way of Water was Universal’s F9: The Fast Saga, which raced off to 202.7 million online views in its first 24 hours. The Way Of Water garnered more looks than Black Widow (116.8 million); Incredibles 2 (113.1 million); and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (112.4 million).
The Way of Water will take us back to the lush planet of Pandora, where Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is raising a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), but danger looms once again for the Na’vi tribe and the planet itself. Original Avatar stars return alongside Worthington and Saldaña, including Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine and Stephen Lang as the villain Colonel Miles Quaritch. Newcomers include Cameron’s Titanic star, Kate Winslet, and Vin Diesel.
Have another look at the teaser. Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16:
Here’s the official synopsis for Avatar: The Way of Water:
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water” begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. Directed by James Cameron and produced by Cameron and Jon Landau, the film stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, and Kate Winslet.
For more on Avatar: The Way of Water, check out these stories:
Last night, the Boston Celtics managed to withstand yet another monster performance from Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ prodigiously gifted power forward, to even the series at 2 games apiece. Yet there is no doubt Antetokounmpo will continue to dominate, he is quite literally a once-in-a-generation talent who took the Bucks to the promised land last year to win them their first title since 1971. As sensational as Antetokounmpo is on the court, his life leading up to his ascendance to the top tier of the NBA’s star-studded league is even more astonishing. Now, Disney+ has revealed the first trailer for Rise, an original film based on his life that tracks the Antetokounmpos journey from Nigeria to Greece to the NBA.
Rise will reveal how Gianni’s parents, Charles and Vera (Dayo Okeniyi and Yetide Badaki, respectively) took their family to Greece, where they lived under the perpetual threat of deportation while trying to provide for their kids. Life was hard—the Antetokounmpos did everything they could to make it work—and that meant brothers Giannis (Uche Agada) and Thanasis (Ral Agada) were part of that equation, selling things to tourists to make ends meet. But the brothers did get to play some basketball on the side, coming to the sport late but finding themselves picking it up quickly. They played on a local youth team, and it became clear they were gifted. Yet a future in the NBA? An impossibility.
We know now that not only was it possible, but that Giannis would prove to be one of the most transformational NBA players in years. He entered the draft in 2013, a long shot despite his size, strength, and speed. His brother, Kostas (Jaden Osimuwa) also made it to the league, and the two of them did the unthinkable—they won back-to-back championships with their respective teams (Kostas won with the Los Angeles Lakers, Giannis with the Bucks the following year).
The NBA playoffs are in full swing, and Giannis’s insane abilities are on display for the entire world to see. Rise promises to show us how he, his brother, and his family managed to turn their grit and determination, and the brother’s gifts, into an unbelievable career. And he’s only 27.
Check out the trailer below. Rise premieres on Disney+ on June 24.
Here’s the official synopsis for Rise:
Audiences have never seen a story like that of the Antetokounmpos. After emigrating from Nigeria to Greece, Charles and Vera Antetokounmpo (Dayo Okeniyi and Yetide Badaki, respectively) struggled to survive and provide for their five children, while living under the daily threat of deportation. With their oldest son still in Nigeria with relatives, the couple were desperate to obtain Greek citizenship but found themselves undermined by a system that blocked them at every turn. When they weren’t selling items to tourists on the streets of Athens with the rest of the family, the brothers– Giannis (Uche Agada) and Thanasis (Ral Agada)–would play basketball with a local youth team. Latecomers to the sport, they discovered their great abilities on the basketball court and worked hard to become world class athletes, along with brother, Kostas (Jaden Osimuwa). With the help of an agent, Giannis entered the NBA Draft in 2013 in a long shot prospect that would change not only his life but the life of his entire family. And last season, Giannis and Thanasis helped bring the Milwaukee Bucks their first championship ring in 50 years, while Kostas played for the previous season champs, the Los Angeles Lakers.
For more stories on Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
Cindy Mollo‘s big break came following a move to New York where she landed on the NBC show Homicide: Life on the Street editing a number of episodes throughout the ‘90s. “I’ve always worked with great writers,” Mollo says. “With Homicide, I learned from one of the best in the business, Tom Fontana, about how to put a story together, connect different beats and move scenes around. I was learning all these tricks of storytelling that I could put into my kit and use show after show.”
Since then, Mollo has cut Panic (2000), Ready to Rumble (2001), several episodes of Mad Men, House of Cards, and the Deadwood movie, earning herself a number of Emmy nominations. But it wasn’t until Ozark that she did something for the first time in her career: cutting the pilot and last episode of a series. “It was really gratifying editing Ozark, Mollo says. “It even came down to me turning down projects during the fourth season because I really wanted that feeling of being a completist. That I worked on every season. It never mattered to me before, but on this one, I really wanted to see it through.”
Ozark tells the story of the Bryde family – Marty (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Laura Linney), Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz), and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) – who uproot their lives in Chicago for the Missouri lakes after Marty, who is laundering money for a Mexican cartel, promises he will return a large sum of stolen funds that his former (and very dead) business partner was found to be skimming. The uneasiness of the show, and undoubtedly what hooks you in, is the scheming, lying, and killing that takes place in order for the Byrdes to dig themselves out. The finale, “A Hard Way to Go,” directed by Bateman, was one of its most shocking yet.
“We didn’t know the ending for a long time,” says Mollo. The final season was split into two parts each with seven episodes. “We all had our theories before the script was published. I thought the writers clearly love Ruth so she would survive and take baby Zeke and go off into the sunset. Well, that didn’t happen.”
No, it did not. Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) is one of Ozark‘s greatest characters, a Missouri sprite whose small stature belies a ferocious will. From the very beginning, it’s Ruth who helps Marty launder money through various businesses, but it’s Ruth who ends up being killed by Camila Elizondro (Veronica Falcón), sister to Omar Navarro (Felix Solis), the now dispatched head of the Navarro cartel, who rubs Ruth out for killing her son, Javi (Alfonso Herrera).
“When I read the last episode I called Chris Mundy [executive producer] and told him I cannot believe this episode. It’s perfect,” Mollo continues. “If you remember in the first season there was an episode called “Nest Box” [S1/E7] that was all about invasive species. And literally about invasive bird species. So by the time the Brydes come to the Ozarks they are toxic to the Langmore family. So it made sense that Ruth couldn’t get out of clean. I felt this was absolutely the only way the show could end. Yes, Marty gets away with it, whatever it is, but they are forever ruined because of what happens to their son.”
Ozark totaled 44 episodes, and Mollo cut 19 of them, and along the way, she edited the deaths of a boatload of people. Storylines had her dissolving business partners in barrels of lye, hitting Sam Dermody’s mother Eugenia (Sharon Blackwood) with a garbage truck, accidentally shooting Pastor Mason Young (Michael Mosley), suffocating drug dealers, drowning FBI Agent Roy Petty (Jason Butler Harner) and the roadside assignation of Ruth’s father Cade (Trevor Long). But it didn’t stop there. Mollo also cut the memorable aforementioned death scenes of cartel leaders Omar Navarro and his nephew Javi. Her favorite among the list though was Marty and Wendy’s sweet and innocent therapist Sue Shelby (Marylouise Burke) in season three.
The couple seeks out counseling as a place to vent their frustrations, and during an outburst, their relationship with the drug cartel comes out. Marty goes into damage control by blackmailing Sue with a “sh*tload” of cash in order to keep her quiet. Unfortunately, Sue lavishly buys an obnoxious luxury sports car, a McLaren. Refusing to return it after a warning from Marty and the cartel’s lawyer Helen (Janet McTeer), she receives a visit from the series’ ominous hitman Nelson (Nelson Bonilla).
“I loved everything about that storyline. Sue gets so into thinking she’s part of the Byrde’s criminality she bought that ridiculous car which was essentially the nail in her coffin,” says Mollo. “What I loved most about the end of her story was how much fun we were able to have with Nelson. He is so stiff and rigid, but when he shows up on Sue’s doorstep, we were able to have great fun with the character. He sits down on the couch and starts talking to her and then slowly pulls out the gun. I loved how methodical he gets. He wraps up the body, wipes down her computer, and steals her files and any records of the Brydes being patients. Then Helen and he submerge the McLaren and Helen says, ‘do you ever get tired of this?’ which Nelson replies with, ‘not really.’ He’s a machine. This is what he does.”
For Ruth’s tragic death, the editor leaned into the emotions of the character. “When Camilla comes and shoots Ruth, we are practically straight on, at a slight angle. Ruth is defiant at that moment. She doesn’t regret anything. She is her truest self then,” Mollo continues. “After she’s struck with the bullet, it’s a high angle shot over Ruth’s body that makes you feel the loss even more. It’s angelic. She’s alone, lying next to where her dream was to come true – a big house with a pool and a circular drive so you never had to back out to turn around.”
Mollo says she thought one or more of the Byrdes would meet their demise. “I thought maybe there would be a message like crime doesn’t pay. But the message is more that you’re never really free when you get into this world. It’s what Wendy kept saying throughout the fourth season that they needed to get out alive and clean.”
How unclean are the Byrdes? They are responsible, in one way or another, for countless deaths, including Ruth’s, who each member of the family loved in their own way. The Byrdes manage to survive Ozark, but there’s one more terrible twist at the very end. Dogged private investigator Mel Sattem (Adam Rothenberg) has found proof that Marty and Wendy are responsible for the death of Wendy’s brother, Ben (Tom Pelphrey). Mel is the surprising yet inevitable deliverer of justice to the Byrdes, who will finally have to—nope. Jonah aiming a shotgun on Mel is the second to last thing we see in Ozark. The last is a hint of a smile on Marty Byrde’s face. Fade to black. Then, the sound of the gun going off.
“By the end, you realize two things happened: Jonah had to kill someone and he’s still in high school. Then they have to take Mel (Adam Rothenberg) to the crematorium,” Mollo says. “Maybe someone would come looking for Mel or they would be seen. It’s a never-ending loop. They’re alive together, but are they really free?”
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
After a wait that would have made even the non-sentient Westworld hosts impatient, HBO’s ambitious sci-fi series is back. A brand new trailer for season 4 reveals the return of Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and the gang, who have all been offline, as it were, since the season three finale in May 2020.
Who better to welcome us back to Westworld‘s special blend of haunted sci-fi dystopia better than Lou Reed, whose song “Perfect Day” greets us as we’re reunited with Maeve (Thandie Newton), Caleb Nichols (Aaron Paul), Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), Bernard Shaw (Jeffrey Wright), and even the Man in Black (Ed Harris).
The trailer is wordless, save for Reed’s deathless voice, but it gives us a glimpse of the terrors to come. HBO describes season four as a “dark odyssey about the fate of sentient life on earth,” so the stakes are certainly high. The money shot is a host, her face still unconnected, spewing insects. In fact, the trailer is bug-crazy, with insects swarming and flying out of (and into) eyes and mouths. It’s classic a Westworld teaser, heavy on portent, light on specifics, but gorgeously done.
Westworld comes from creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who also executive produce alongside Alison Schapker, Denis Thé, J.J. Abrams, Athena Wickham, Richard J. Lewis, and Ben Stephenson.
Check out the trailer below. Westworld returns on June 26.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: L-r: Evan Rachel Wood is Dolores and Tessa Thompson is Charlotte Hale in ‘Westworld,’ episode 4, “Mother of Exiles.” Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO
Netflix’s Love Death + Robots has sneakily become one of the most transgressive, devilishly daring shows on TV. The animated anthology series from Tim Miller (Deadpool) and David Fincher (MINDHUNTER, Mank) is back with volume 3, and the first official trailer delivers the thrills, chills, and sci-fi skills we’ve come to expect from the show.
Love Death + Robots has won 11 Emmys for its daring approach to anthology animation, creating a truly singular viewing experience that can leap from seriously scary to funny to surreal in a single episode. The 9 new episodes in Volume 3 will explore danger on the high seas in Bad Traveling and out in the cosmos in The Very Pulse of the Machine, where astronauts will move through “strange eons of thought” on a distant planet and face mind-melting scenarios. In Vaulted Halls Entombed, soldiers will find the dark side of archeology. Jibaro takes us to a lush, lunatic world where a battle with swords and horses turns insane. Swarm imagines a perfect organic system that promises to bring order to the chaos of human expansion—we’re guessing it won’t go quite the way they’re planning. In Mason’s Rat, the animal kingdom has wised up and declared war on humanity. Then, in Three Robots: Exit Strategies, a trio of bots look to escape, one wisecrack at a time. And finally, in Kill Team Kill and Night of the Mini Dead we get two wars—against monsters and against miniature monsters—all with that uncanny Love Death + Robots panache.
There is no other show quite like it, which is why Love Death + Robots is always on our must-watch list.
Check out the trailer below. Love Death + Robots returns to Netflix on May 20.
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
Emmy-winning animated anthology Love, Death + Robots returns with a third-volume executive produced by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) and David Fincher (MINDHUNTER, Mank). Terror, imagination, and beauty combine in new episodes which stretch from uncovering an ancient evil to a comedic apocalypse, telling startling short stories of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction with trademark wit and visual invention.
For more on what’s coming to Netflix, check out these stories:
We open on the lush planet of Pandora, with members of the Na’vi tribe running across a moss-covered tree. Then we see Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Jake (Sam Worthington), who have started a family. We are plunged into the hyper-realistic alien planet of James Cameron’s world, a place we haven’t been for 13-years, since Avatar (2009) bowed and ushered in a new era of filmmaking.
The new trailer is short on dialogue and plot specifics but big on beauty. And it hints at the troubles to come, as Jake promises Neytiri that wherever they go, they go as a family, which will serve as their fortress. We see glimpses of the trouble brewing, with war appearing imminent and the splendor of Pandora once again being threatened.
Joining Worthington and Saldana in the cast are Giovanni Ribisi, Sigourney Weaver, CCH Pounder, and the original film’s villain, Stephen Lang. Newcomers include Kate Winslet, Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Edie Falco, Cliff Curtis, and Jemaine Clement. Disney plans to re-release Cameron’s original Avatar in theaters on September 23. During its original run in theaters back in 2009, Avatar played on the big screen for an astonishing 10 months.
Avatar: The Way of Water will, like the original Avatar, feature brand new technology that Cameron and his team deployed to capture the many underwater scenes. This means that theaters showing the film will likely require equipment upgrades, but it will be a small price to pay for being to show this movie in all its glory.
Avatar: The Way of Water swims into theaters on December 16. Its sequels are due on December 20, 2024, December 18, 2026, and December 22, 2028.
Check out the trailer below:
Here’s the official synopsis for Avatar: The Way of Water:
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water” begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. Directed by James Cameron and produced by Cameron and Jon Landau, the film stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement and Kate Winslet.
For more on Avatar: The Way of Water, check out these stories:
Before Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty showrunner Max Borenstein sat down to write the show’s pilot episode, executive producer Adam McKay gave him one simple note: “Have fun with it.” Crammed with boisterous performances, Winning Time (its season finale aired this past Sunday, May 8, and is now renewed by HBO for a second season) does offer fun to spare but the series also brims with drama as it chronicles the betrayals, rivalries, romances, traumatic childhoods, family infighting, and near-death traffic accidents leading to the Los Angeles Lakers’ 1980 world championship.
Borenstein previously wrote four Godzilla movies and Worth, about the real-life lawyer who ran the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. He’d also worked on a couple of projects for HBO that never saw the light of day. When McKay and producing partner Kevin Messick approached the network with their idea to adapt Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” HBO executives introduced the Oscar-nominated director (Don’t Look Up, The Big Short) to Borenstein and they clicked.
Borenstein and his writers’ room crafted an intricately detailed narrative that attracted Oscar winners Adrian Brody and Sally Fields along with Pulitzer Prize-winning actor Tracy Letts, Jason Clarke as hot-tempered coach Jerry West and John C. Reilly in the lead role of team owner Jerry Buss. The show also showcases uncannily effective star turns from newcomers Solomon Hughes as somber Kareem Abdul Jabar and Quincy Isaiah as the joyous Magic Johnson.
Backed by a couple of basketballs perched on the bookshelf of his Los Angeles office, Borenstein spoke to The Credits about combovers, skyhooks, obsolete cameras, former Jerry West’s criticism of the show, athletes as artists, and basketball as a vehicle for addressing race relations, capitalism and gender roles.
What drew you to this story?
I grew up in L.A. and the Lakers are the first team I knew as a child, but I wouldn’t have wanted to make a show that was just for basketball fans. What really attracted me about the Lakers’ story is that we could dive deep into the specificity of this world of basketball and use that as a prism to reflect central themes of what America was becoming in this seventies-to-eighties moment that created the “Me Generation,” which I think is now, for better the worse, the foundational core of where we are today.
The show personifies all these big themes through an array of wildly ambitious characters who carry around some bittersweet backstories.
The moment I stopped looking at the characters as athletes and started to see them as artists, that’s when I started to connect. There’s something driving these people to fill some kind of hole that might never get filled. That’s where the fire, the drive comes from. There’s some kind of wound, and I feel like there’s a beautiful pathos in that.
Quincy Isaiah is Magic Johnson in “Winning Time.” Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Winning Time seems like a beast of a show to put together: ten episodes, period piece, huge cast, fact-based. HBO greenlit the series in April 2019. Where did you go from there?
We were about to shoot the series when the Pandemic hit so my collaborators and I just kept re-working the scripts for a year [during lockdown]. This pause allowed us to find aspects of the story where normally we would have had the big train [of production] on our asses. Now we had a year to do more research and find and identify the different ways they coach and their personalities.
Speaking of coaches, Winning Time prompted intense criticism from Jerry West and Kareem Abdul Jabar over the way Coach West was portrayed. Were you surprised by their reactions?
I can’t imagine how strange it would be to have my own life adapted and dramatized as a television series so I would never judge anyone’s reaction. What I can say is that the show was made with a great deal of affection and appreciation and respect for all of these people. It’s also been made with a great deal of research. We read every book we could get our hands on. We watched every interview, and read every article from every daily newspaper using the Lexus Nexus [database]. And also, one great benefit of telling a story about people who live their lives in the public eye is that they themselves have told their own stories in their own words, which is what Jerry West did in his wonderful book “West by West: My Charmed and Tormented Life.”
L-r: John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Jason Clarke. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Wait a minute, Jerry West’s memoir has “Tormented” right there in the title?
Yeah. It’s a magnificent book and a big source for us, as were many other books.
I haven’t read the book, but it’s startling to see Jerry West breaking a golf club over his knee in the first episode, throwing his MVP trophy through the glass window of his office, and later, curled up in his underwear on the floor of his home.
Our guiding star throughout the process was making sure that our characterizations and the big facts were true to form. That said, of course, it’s a dramatization. We’re getting into closed rooms and behind doors that we have no access to. We can only do our best to piece together and dramatize what may have been said, what plausibly could have been said, based on our understanding [of the facts]. That’s part of the art of it, the challenge and the joy of doing a dramatization. It’s all about making choices.
Stephen Adly Guirgis, John C. Reilly, Brett Cullen, Jason Clarke. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Casting Winning Time must have been a gargantuan task. First of all, it’s a huge ensemble. Second, many of your cast members not only have to act; they also have to be really tall. Quincy Isaiah does a remarkable job in channeling the Magic Johnson mystique. How did you find him?
Quincy had just arrived in L.A. He’d been a center for his football team in Kalamazoo but wanted to be an actor. He sent a tape to our genius casting director Francine Maisler just as McKay and I were starting to get nervous. We’d looked at dozens of people, but no one brought the kind of charisma we needed. Then Francine said, “Look at this tape. We watched it in McKay’s office. There was something about Isaiah’s smile, his charm. We brought Isaiah in, gave him a couple of scenes to read and he blew us away. Then we asked, can you play basketball? Of course, he said yes – – he’s an actor! And Quincy actually could play, a little. So we had our friend Rick Fox put Quincy through the wringer. Rick came into the gym determined to make Quincy puke, and Quincy was determined not to give in. He just gutted it out. Every time he did a scene with one of the greats, whether it be Jason Clarke or John C. Reilly or whomever, Quincy took it as a challenge to bring it. He’s been a joy to watch.
Quincy Isaiah, Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Winning Time breaks the fourth wall in ways made famous by Adam McKay in The Big Short. You’ve got direct address bits where John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss speaks straight into the camera, and you’ve got giant on-screen text describing a freeze-frame of Jason Clarke’s Jerry West, for example, as “NEVER BEEN HAPPY.” Did you take naturally to this irreverent style?
I wrote the pilot knowing Adam’s style, which I think of as less a style as it is a freedom. When he directed the pilot, it kind of unshackled everyone to explore and experiment and take risks. There’s a flexibility to pull out whatever tool you feel will help tell the story best. Hank Corwin, who edited the pilot, has an incredibly free-wheeling style, intercutting different footage that aesthetically short circuits the wall you put up when you’re watching something you know is fictionalized.
The grainy video look goes a long way toward evoking this early eighties era. How did you create that vintage effect?
That came from our boy wonder genius director of photography Todd Banhazl. He found this defunct format Ikegami camera that hadn’t been used in forty years when it was replaced by Beta[max]. So he dug up these old Ikegami cameras, refurbished them, and initially used them to replicate game footage or news footage. But it quickly became clear to us that whenever we saw a scene shot by the Ikegami on the monitor, it felt like a time machine. What I continued to find throughout the season is that the Ikegami [footage] feels like someone’s taking a home movie of the scene. Rather than putting you at a distance, it pulls you into the emotion in a kind of shocking way.
Also kind of shocking is John C. Reilly’s portrayal of Jerry Buss, the brash real estate hedonist whose vision of basketball as entertainment helped revitalize the NBA. Watching Reilly as Buss in his combover, shirt unbuttoned to his waist, the aviator glasses, the mustache, the drinking, the cocaine, the smoking, the Playboy Club: He’s a real piece of work.
That scene where we see Jerry doing the combover is the perfect metaphor for this Gatsby-like American character that John embodies so well. He’s irrepressible. You can’t keep him down. If you say, “Well you’re bald,” Jerry says, “No I can overcome that too!”
Shaylaren Hilton, John C. Reilly, Stephen Adly Guirgis. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Casting John C. Reilly in this juicy role produced its fair share of controversy, fair to say?
Everyone knows the ins and outs that have been reported [about Adam McKay alienating his one-time best friend Will Ferrell by not picking him to portray Jerry Buss]. A week or so before production, John’s name came up and it was obvious that he would be genius in the role. We went over to his house and saw him with the combover and the mustache. John had already started to vibe that character in ways that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The moment you see him as Jerry Buss, you say “How could it have been anybody but John C. Reilly?”
There’s so much drama happening off the court in Winning Time but it’s the basketball games that provide the throughline for this story about the Laker’s 1980 championship season. How did you go about re-creating these games?
Getting the basketball right was a huge challenge. People can watch real games on YouTube, so our goal was to get inside the emotional world of the men playing the game. To do this, we studied game footage, not always with an eye to a perfect reproduction of exact moments, but with the intent of capturing the style of these particular players. Magic had to have his dribbles and passes right. Wilkes had to shoot like Wilkes. Kareem had to have his skyhook down pat. Our basketball coordinator Idan Ravin, who works as a shooting coach with a number of high-level pros, was instrumental in training the actors and bringing this vintage style of the game to life.
Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Did you have access to the actual arenas from this era?
Because of Covid, we couldn’t shoot in real arenas so we built our own professional basketball court and stands on a sound stage. Combined with incredible VFX work, it created the illusion of all these bygone arenas.
Anything else you’d like to add about the making of Winning Time?
We think of it as an American epic that presents this cross-section of Americans, wealthy, poor, Black, white. We’re dealing with capitalism, racism, race relations, and gender roles while still maintaining a certain lightness of touch. It’s fun and there’s a weight to it.
For more on Winning Time, check out these stories:
Director Sam Raimi has helped deliver Marvel a fantastic start to their 2022 box office and their vaunted Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 4. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the second film for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange, conjured a stellar $185 million in its opening weekend, one of the largest domestic openings ever. It’s also the second-best opening in the pandemic era and totaled $450 million globally.
This is exactly the kind of epic opening weekend that Marvel, Walt Disney Studios, theater owners, and Hollywood writ large wanted to see. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness follows Warner Bros. The Batman has yet another blockbuster bringing in almost pre-pandemic numbers and hopefully augers a continued hot streak as a slew of tentpole movies are set for release. The Batman is currently the highest-grossing domestic release of 2022, with $369.1 million as of now.
With Raimi back in the fold (he directed the original Spider-Man trilogy back in the early aughts, changing the superhero game forever), he helped deliver a dizzy, deliriously rich film that now stands as the 11th biggest domestic launch in history, and the seventh-largest opening for a Marvel film. In The Multiverse of Madness only trails the four Avenger films, Black Panther, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. That’s great company.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness opened as the top film in all major markets overseas, including a big $30 million in South Korea. The domestic haul included $36 million in Thursday previews and $90 million on Friday alone, the 7th biggest opening day of all time. The film is currently playing in 4,545 theaters, which is the widest location count of the pandemic era and the fifth-biggest of all time. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness pulled in 59 percent of male viewers, with 74 percent of them under the age of 34. The film also did bonkers business on Imax and other premium large-format screens. The Imax numbers were $33 million, a record in May.
After Doctor Strange made such a fateful appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home and unleashed the multiverse in an attempt to help his friend Peter Parker, all bets were off. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange is now trying to help a young girl named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) whose skills include being able to hop across universes. When a demonic force is trying to steal her powers, the good Doctor has to step in. Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and even Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) return.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is, of course, in theaters now.
For more on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, check out these stories:
The limited series The Offer, now streaming on Paramount+, tells the deliciously dramatic story of how one of the greatest films ever made, The Godfather, almost never came to the screen. It is based on the memories of the film’s Oscar-winning producer Al Ruddy, here played by Miles Teller, and spans from the release of Mario Puzo’s bestseller in 1969, through the film’s production to its release in 1972. What makes the show so compelling is the spot-on portrayal of real-life figures important to the creation of Francis Ford Coppola’s deathless film to life. Matthew Goode plays Paramount Studios executive Robert Evans, Dan Fogler brings auteur Francis Ford Coppola to life, and Patrick Gallo is remarkable as Mario Puzo. Actors Juno Temple and Nora Arnezeder embody two powerful women that had a significant impact on the story, with Temple playing secretary-turned-agent Bettye McCart, and Arnezeder as Ruddy’s partner Françoise Glazer, who owned Chateau Marmont. Giovanni Ribisi is larger than life and more than a little terrifying as mob boss Joe Columbo, who made a concerted effort to stop the film from being made. For fans of The Godfather, The Offer will be impossible to refuse.
Having formerly worked on blockbuster franchises Harry Potter and The Hobbit, Makeup Department Head Katy Fray came to The Offer with lots of experience with prosthetics, which she’d need to deploy in her work here. The Credits spoke to Fray about the inspiration she got from makeup genius Dick Smith, how she recreated the styles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and how she captured the iconic looks of the famous and infamous of the time, from icons like Robert Redford, Ali McGraw, and, of course, Marlon Brando.
Can you talk about some of the signature elements of the real people that you incorporated into the makeup of the actors portraying them?
Well, for Al Ruddy, Miles Teller was amazing in collaborating for his look, and Al Ruddy himself was involved in the movie as well and he was really excited about Miles playing the character, so we took the essence of these extra sideburns and extra hair, but he was always clean cut on his face, perfectly shaven every day, like he shows up for work every day looking smart, but he’s also very much a man-about-town. He had to have that charisma. We kept his makeup very clean every day.
Miles Teller as Albert S. Ruddy. Photo courtesy Paramount+
How about Bettye McCart?
Juno Temple was amazing as Bettye McCart. We kept her very fresh-looking. As a character, she was always presentable, but she was constantly running around doing stuff, so she isn’t meant to look perfect. She’s trying to do a job. We started there, but we also used a lot of references from Look and Playboy and every other popular magazine of the 70s to hone in on how to create her character, and a lot of others as well.
Nora Arnezeder as Françoise Glazer obviously had to have a look with a lot more French influence. She stood out from the rest of the women in the series, which was a choice we made in collaboration with the costume department. We all worked together with Nora, and I think we sold her as being different because the French and the European influence was huge, as we saw from French fashion magazines of that era. We also used a lot of reference photos of Françoise, a lot of gorgeous pictures of her from that time, and her look changed later, so we were lucky to have those images.
Giovanni Ribisi looks very different as mob boss Joe Columbo—how did you transform him so thoroughly?
Giovanni was just a delight. Every day he came in so committed, like ‘I want to look like this man. I want to be this man. If you need to cut my hair or whatever you need, whatever you want, just do it.’ He is so method, and he just knew the character so well and had done an enormous amount of research himself. We shaved the top of his head and kept a little tiny piece in the front, and he was happy to walk around like that for 6 months. We added a little hairpiece on top, applying it every day. There was very minimal makeup, just a little bit of eyebrow, but the hair was the main thing, to give him that receding hairline. We buffed his nails every day to make sure he looked like he was manicured.
Dan Fogler already looks a bit like Francis Ford Coppola. What was the secret to pushing his look?
The key was his beard. It’s hard when actors are doing interviews and such, but I told him, ‘no trimming!’ We filled in his beard to start with until it grew through. Dan already had a strong likeness, so we just had to lean into it. The nice thing was that he and Patrick Gallo, who played Mario Puzo, lived together for a month in the beginning, so they got close, and we were able to fine-tune them into these iconic people so many know. With Patrick, we covered up his tattoos every day, sometimes at the last minute if there was a costume change. Patrick was lucky because he could grow his hair fast. He started growing his sideburns at the beginning and they just got bushier and bushier.
Patrick Gallo as Mario Puzo and Dan Fogler as Francis Ford Coppola. Photo credit: Nicole Wilder/Paramount+
You had to recreate the iconic looks of famous actors like Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Al Pacino, Ali McGraw, and Ann Margret. How did you approach that?
Everything happened really quickly, which was good because we didn’t have time to overanalyze things. It was a dream to be able to try to recreate those people. We’d just line up a ton of photos and try our best to capture their essence, getting the facial hair and skin tone and finding and using the exact colors. We had a great stock of hair and so we could add it wherever we needed it, which is great because the 70s is so all about hair. It was getting these fine details to make these actors look as close as we could to those they were portraying.
The cast of “The Offer.” Photo credit: Nicole Wilder/Paramount+
No doubt Dick Smith, who did makeup on the original Godfather, was an inspiration for your work on The Offer. What kind of research did you do on his work with Marlon Brando, and what did you take from it that helped with the designs for Justin Chambers?
That was probably the scariest moment of my career because I’ve researched and studied Dick Smith’s work from the very beginning of my career. I had references of every photo we could find of what Dick did in the movie. I had a picture of him doing makeup on Marlon Brando that I looked at every day and it was a great inspiration. We looked at a lot of his techniques, and luckily Dick was very open about his experience and what he did. He was always very kind in trying to teach younger people, so we learned a lot about his techniques. We then got Justin’s mouth impressions done, and we were able to replicate the dental plumpers that Dick used to make Marlon’s jaw look like it was hanging down lower. We sculpted and structured the mouth to look more like The Don, and Justin was so happy to have that because it added an extra layer to the character. We used Dick Smith’s techniques, but I used more modern appliances and pieces because technology has advanced a lot since then. We made some silicone transfers to go on his face to turn Justin into Marlon Brando but also into The Don, with The Godfather makeup. The whole thing was scary and fun at the same time.
