We’ve got our first look at director Robert Schwentke’s Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, revealing Henry Golding as the titular hero who will ultimately go on to become one of the original members of the G.I. Joe military unit. Snake Eyes has long been the most mysterious member of the G.I. Joe team, the masked warrior who is more comfortable fighting than revealing anything about himself. That looks like it’ll change in Schwentke’s film, of course—you don’t cast the star of Crazy Rich Asians if you’re going to hide him in a mask the whole time. Golding will be front and center and quite unmasked, as we find out how this “tenacious loner” became Snake Eyes.
Snake Eyes comes from a script by Evan Spilotopoulos, and also stars Andrew Koji as Storm Shadow, Úrsula Corberó as The Baroness, Samara Weaving as Scarlett, Haruka Abe as Akiko, Tahehiro Hira as Kenta, and Iko Uwais as Hard Master.
Snake Eyes is set to hit theaters on July 23. Check out the first trailer below:
Here’s the synopsis from Paramount:
Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins stars Henry Golding as Snake Eyes, a tenacious loner who is welcomed into an ancient Japanese clan called the Arashikage after saving the life of their heir apparent. Upon arrival in Japan, the Arashikage teach Snake Eyes the ways of the ninja warrior while also providing something he’s been longing for: a home. But, when secrets from his past are revealed, Snake Eyes’ honor and allegiance will be tested – even if that means losing the trust of those closest to him. Based on the iconic G.I. Joe character, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins also stars Andrew Koji as Storm Shadow, Úrsula Corberó as The Baroness, Samara Weaving as Scarlett, Haruka Abe as Akiko, Tahehiro Hira as Kenta and Iko Uwais as Hard Master.
For more Paramount films, check out these stories:
Featured image: Henry Golding plays Snake Eyes in Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins from Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Skydance. Photo by Niko Tavernise. Courtesy Paramount Pictuers.
It’s a valid question coming from Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the sister (of sorts) to Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Natasha is behind the wheel as she drives the two of them away from a motorcyclist in pursuit. The motorcyclist has a gun and is taking dead aim at the sisters, and Yelena wants to know if Natasha has gamed this scenario out at all. This fresh clip from director Cate Shortland’s Black Widow teases the first big Marvel movie to hit theaters since the pandemic hit more than a year ago, and the first film in Marvel’s Phase 4. It’s also a reminder of why seeing a film like this in the theater is an unbeatable experience—as thrilling as the clip might seem on your computer screen, it’ll be orders of magnitude more engrossing on a big screen.
Set between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, Black Widow centers on Natasha’s attempt to deal with her past and the people she left behind when she became an Avenger. This puts her back in contact with Yelena, as well as Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) and Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour). It won’t be long, however, until the four of them will have to face a mysterious force determined to bring Natasha down, and anyone else colluding with her.
Black Widow hits theaters and Disney+ Premiere Access on July 9. Check out the clip below.
Here’s the official synopsis from Marvel:
In Marvel Studios’ action-packed spy thriller “Black Widow,” Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger. Scarlett Johansson reprises her role as Natasha/Black Widow, Florence Pugh stars as Yelena, David Harbour portrays Alexei/The Red Guardian, and Rachel Weisz is Melina. Directed by Cate Shortland and produced by Kevin Feige, “Black Widow”—the first film in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe— will launch simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ with Premier Access in most Disney+ markets on July 9, 2021.
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Memorial Day Weekend represents a big moment for theaters, theater-goers, and movie lovers. Two of the year’s biggest titles—John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II for Paramount and Craig Gillespie’s Cruella for Disney are hitting theaters on May 28. Add the fact that the CDC has changed their guidance and stipulated that vaccinated people can eschew wearing masks and can gather indoors, and in large groups, under many circumstances signal a major seachange for theaters and those of us eager to see movies on the big screen again.
With that in mind, let this batch of photos from A Quiet Place Part II fire up your imagination for what it’ll feel like to see a film critics loved, and have called “nerve-shredding” and the kind of viewing experience “movie theaters were made for,” on the big screen. If you’re going to get hunted by aliens, there’s no better way than on the biggest screen possible.
The images tease the larger world Krasinski’s film is exploring, after having spent the entirety of the first film dealing solely with the Abbott family and their fight for survival against the nameless, numberless alien predators who are hunting humans by sound. You’ll see some behind-the-scenes shots of Krasinski, his cast, and his crew on set. You’ll also notice one shot in particular, of Djimon Hounsou’s character, in what appears to be an image from before the alien attack. We’ve seen a glimpse of this in previous trailers—Part II will reveal life a bit before Earth became an alien hellscape.
Part II‘s main focus is tracking the remaining Abbotts (Krasinski’s Lee Abbott was lost in the first film) as they venture out into the wider world and come into contact with other survivors. Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Marcus and Regan (Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds, respectively), and the baby born in the bathtub in that unforgettable scene from the 2018 film will encounter fellow survivors (played by Cillian Murphy and the aforementioned Djimon Hounsou), as they try to figure out how to live—possibly live together—without drawing the hunters towards them.
In sum, we can’t wait to see this movie the way it was intended—shrieking with fear and joy amongst a bunch of strangers in a darkened theater. Check out the photos below.
Regan (Millicent Simmonds), left, and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Regan (Millicent Simmonds) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Man on Island (Djimon Hounsou) and Regan (Millicent Simmonds) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Man on Island (Djimon Hounsou) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.L-r, Marcus (Noah Jupe), Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.L-r, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Evelyn (Emily Blunt) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.L-r, Director John Krasinski, Noah Jupe and Emily Blunt on the set of Paramount Pictures’ “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Evelyn (Emily Blunt) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Evelyn (Emily Blunt) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Evelyn (Emily Blunt) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Emmett (Cillian Murphy) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Emily Blunt, left, and John Krasinski on the set of Paramount Pictures’ “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.Director John Krasinski on the set of “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Featured image: Evelyn (Emily Blunt) braves the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo by Jonny Cournoyer. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
With the CDC announcing yesterday that vaccinated Americans can stop wearing masks and maintaining social distance in most situations, and as we approach a big Memorial Day Weekend that will see a slew of major movies hit theaters, the momentum for a movie theater recovery is in sight. To that end, 20th Century and Marvel Studios have decided to release two of their big titles, Free Guy and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings respectively, exclusively in theaters instead of getting a hybrid release on Disney+. Disney CEO Bob Chapek confirmed on an earnings call on Thursday that each film will spend 45 days in theaters before moving on to Disney+, a shift in the way they’ve approached releases for their recent slate of films.
Free Guy, starring Ryan Reynolds and directed by Shawn Levy, finds Reynolds’ Guy discovering that he’s not just a bank teller going about his life, but actually inside a massive, open-world video game. The film will premiere in theaters on August 13. Marvel Studios’ Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Simu Liu, is the first Marvel movie to be led by an Asian superhero and will hit theaters exclusively on September 3.
These plans are very different from what many major films are doing between now and July. Cruella (May 28) and Black Widow (July 9) will get releases in theaters and on Disney+ Premiere on the same day. Ditto for the Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt-led Jungle Cruise, which will appear on the big screen and on Disney+ Premiere on July 30.
The news on Free Guy and Shang-Chi seems to indicate Disney still sees great value in the exclusive theatrical run. Chapek said on the earnings call that Disney will “continue to watch the evolution of the recovery of the theatrical marketplace,” but that for now, they’re only making firm plans for the rest of 2021. Once our recovery from the pandemic becomes more fulsome in 2022, the merits of a hybrid release might look much different.
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Abby Alben graduated from UCLA and, like so many people, was eager to find a job in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. What she ended up finding was a career. Alben, our latest Future Critic (although really, she’s more of a Future Producer) began working at the independent production company Mother & Daughter Entertainment. Right before we were set to publish our video interview with her, she was promoted to Head of Digital Media. Not a bad start to her post-collegiate path in the industry.
Mother & Daughter Entertainment, befitting its name, was co-founded by mother-daughter duo Elizabeth and Isabella Blake-Thomas. Their production company is run by an all-female team of filmmakers, with Alben now overseeing all digital media, including managing social media pages and producing their podcast, “Filmmaking Without Fear.” “Our motto is ‘Making Content That Matters,'” Alben tells us, with Mother & Daughter committed to telling “touching, diverse stories that move you, call you to action, or simply make you laugh.”
Alben’s work also includes providing notes and coverage on projects on Mother & Daughter’s upcoming slate. She was on set for their latest feature, Will You Be My Quarantine (starring Jodie Sweetin), which recently won the ReFrame Stamp for having a gender-balanced production.
Alben is passionate about storytelling and is eager to help pioneer a new, more inclusive era in the film industry. When she’s not working, you can often find her debating Star Wars or Marvel Cinematic Universe plot points with her family, or marveling (pun intended) at how swiftly she was swept up by Netflix’s Bridgerton.
In the first part of our interview, Alben discusses her work at Mother & Daughter entertainment, and the joy of working with driven, compassionate women:
In the second part of our interview, Alben discusses a few of her current obsessions. As a big Regency Era buff, she went into Netflix’s hit series Bridgerton ready to judge the period accuracy. Then, like millions of other people, she fell in love. Alben also discusses being wowed by Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and the potency of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For more of our Future Critics, check out our past interviews:
The Underground Railroad has been a long time coming in Barry Jenkins‘ imagination. As a kid growing up in Miami’s rough Liberty City neighborhood, the writer-director pictured literal railroad tracks running beneath the earth. Fast forward to 2014, when Jenkins thrilled to Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and secured adaptation rights even before he’d finished promoting his Oscar-winning Moonlight movie.
After completing If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins set to work on the 10-episode adaptation slated to start Friday, May 14, on Amazon Prime. Filmed over the course of 116 days in Georgia, The Underground Railroad features sumptuous cinematography from cinematographer James Laxton and a beautifully unnerving score by composer Nicholas Britell, both Oscar-nominated for their contributions to Moonlight. The high-end design elements frame a breakthrough performance from South African actress Thuso Mbedu in the role of runaway slave Cora. Fleeing the unspeakable horrors of a South Carolina plantation, Cora sets off on a perilous journey through North Carolina and Tennessee before joining a community of free Black farmers in Indiana.
“We really wanted the audience to walk a mile in the character’s shoes,” Jenkins said during a Zoom roundtable last week. Speaking to The Credits and other participants, Jenkins explains why his production required an on-set therapist and described the challenges faced in bringing his epic-scaled vision to the small screen.
Barry Jenkins directing “The Underground Railroad.” Photo by Kyle Kaplan. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On the inspirations behind Underground Railroad’s lush visual aesthetic.
We looked at the paintings of [Chicago artist] Kerry James Marshal and also the photography by an Australian photographer named Bill Henson. But really what determined the look was that in the writers’ room, we decided that each time Cora arrived in a new state, it would look and feel the way it did because it was a manifestation of Cora. That was the starting point for the aesthetic. The other thing we decided early on is that we wanted as few edits as possible. Instead of cutting to a new shot, we would create a new shot with movement of the camera, often motivated by the movement of a character, usually Cora.
Thuso Mbedu is Cora Randall in “The Underground Railroad.” Photo by Kyle Kaplan. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On adapting The UndergroundRailroad novel as a limited series.
The book is naturally episodic. Adapting it became about excavating things from the book and getting them into script form, and then working with the actors to understand this story we’re telling. It was a long process. Some of the images [depicting extreme brutality] are rooted in fact, in the actual lived experience. In a shorter time frame, these images can be so loud that they overwhelm what I call the softer images. I felt like giving Cora the full space to encounter all these beautiful people over the course of 10 episodes versus one feature was the best way to capture the full spectrum of her experience.
L-r: Aaron Pierre is Caesar/Christian, and Thuso Mbedu is Cora Randall in “The Underground Railroad.” Photo by Kyle Kaplan. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On the show’s graphic depiction of white-on-Black violence including whippings, beatings and burnings.
People say these images are so beautiful but what’s happening in these episodes is so brutal. But it’s beautiful while these things were happening. It would be almost irresponsible of me to remove the [natural] beauty from these happenings. It’s some attempt at verisimilitude. This is what it looks like for the characters. This is what it should look like for the audience. Instead of spending all this time trying to fight the elements, trying to fight mother nature, you start working with the current and go “Let the water be water.”
Thuso Mbedu is Cora Randall and Aaron Pierre is Caesar/Christian. Photo by Atsushi Nishjima. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On Underground Railroad therapist Kim White helping actors cope with the show’s re-creations of slavery scenarios.
We called her Miss Kim and she commanded the set. You’d see her go over and tap an actor on the shoulder because she knows they needed to talk to somebody. She did it to me once, pulled me off my own set during one sequence. I said, “I have to be strong for the crew.” And she said, “Yes but who’s going to be strong for you if you break?” So she pulled me over and we had a little mini therapy session.
L-r: Zsane Jhey is Lovey, Thuso Mbedu is Cora, and Aubriana Davis is Rose. Photo by Atsushi Nishjima. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On keeping the cast and crew in a healthy mental space during production.
That was as important as getting the scene right or the logistics. Probably even more important, because it’s not worth creating these projects if it’s going to destroy us in the process. Besides having a therapist on set at all times, we also had each other. We kind of lifted each other up in a really beautiful way.
On his initial attraction to Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Underground Railroad.”
The biggest thing for me about Colson’s book is that it seemed like a great opportunity to re-contextualize the story of our ancestors by focusing on this young woman Cora. Without seeing this show that’s ten episodes long, you might think Cora’s trying to vanquish the conditions of American slavery, but she’s really trying to reconcile this sense of abandonment toward her mother. I thought that was an interesting way to come at a story like this. It’s massive in scope and scale but the journey is ultimately about parenting and Cora’s relationship to her mother.
Sheila Atim is Mabel, Cora’s mother. Photo by Atsushi Nishjima. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On casting South African actress Thuso Mbeduin the starring role of Cora.
I have an open-door policy when it comes to casting: If you can show me that you’re the character, then the part is yours. When Thuso’s [audition] tape came through, I immediately saw that she had this ability to emote with her face, her shoulders, her posture. Knowing that Cora, at the start, would not be fully in possession of herself, the actress playing her needed that ability [to communicate non-verbally]. Thuso was clearly capable of doing this.
Thuso Mbedu is Cora Randall in “The Underground Railroad.” Photo by Kyle Kaplan. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
On building the underground railroad set above ground.
I told our production designer Mark Friedberg that it can’t be fake. I want real tracks, real trains, real tunnels. I don’t want green screen, I don’t want CGI. So we found a private rail network and built our tunnels above them. So much of this project was about trying to contextualize what it would be like to be my ancestors. When Thuso first came down on the tracks I told her, “You need to get down on the ground, and touch it, and bang on it.” The train’s like an alien that comes down, knocks on your front door, and hands you a pepperoni pizza. That’s how strange it would be.
On his personal connection to the underground railroad concept.
I remember the first time I heard the phrase “underground railroad” as a kid I imagined—not even imagined, I saw—Black people on trains underground. I just knew it was real “Oh yeah, of course, we built trains underground.” So when I first read Colson’s book, I got that feeling again. There are no trains levitating or flying in the sky. It’s just that Black folks built the tracks underground and I wanted to tap into this uncorrupted feeling. As we started filming the show, it was about “How can we take these elements, the detritus that our ancestors left behind from this very harsh life, and repossess those things and give them a new meaning?”
Featured image: Barry Jenkins directing “The Underground Railroad.” Photo by Atsushi Nishjima. Courtesy Amazon Studios.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldierdirector Kari Skogland had her work cut out for her. Direct roughly six hours worth of action (practically two Avengers films’ worth), introduce a brand new location to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Madripool), brand new villains (the Flag Smashers), a brand new Captain America (Wyatt Russell’s John Walker), and continue the long-established character arcs of Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). Oh, and handle the fallout from Avengers: Endgame. This was before Covid-19 shuttered production and the American political and social landscape was rocked by widespread, historic upheaval, with the largest mass protests in the country’s history in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Skogland and her talented team stayed the course and delivered. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier offered not only thrills and action that rivaled any Marvel film, but also character portraits, especially in Mackie’s Sam Wilson, that spoke to the turmoil within the MCU and the tragedies roiling the real world. Skogland spoke with us about trusting her collaborators, responding to the larger world around the production, and about why Sam Wilson is a different kind of Marvel superhero.
L-r: Falcon/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), director Kari Skogland, and Sarah Wilson (Adepero Oduye) on the set of Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.’ Photo by Chuck Zlotnick. Courtesy Marvel Studios.
The action in this series is unsurprisingly thrilling, but it feels heavier than most Marvel films. Can you unpack that for us?
Each action wants to have its own storyline within the story. People just fighting each other isn’t interesting. Everything must come from character. You’re designing not only that, but you’re saying, Okay, we’ve got six or eight big set pieces, let’s look at each one of them and ask what’s the big story in all of them is, and then break it down. In the first big action set piece, we saw Falcon flying with a lot more air time, so I wanted that to have its own Falcon quality. The Bucky nightmare sequence needed to evoke the Winter Soldier. And from those, onto our first big set-piece, which was the fight on the truck tops.
Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel Studios
That truck top sequence was both thrilling and quite complicated, involving Sam, Bucky, the Flag Smashers, and the new Captain America mixing it up. How did you approach it?
That had to be about them [Sam and Bucky] not working well together, and then in comes Captain America with Lemar (Clé Bennett) and, oh my god, they’re a well-oiled machine. So we really highlighted the character differences. Then ultimately at the end, where there’s this divide and conquer mode, Sam has to take on the villain [Karli Morgenthau, played by Erin Kellyman], and it was really important that he refused to. I really wanted us to see him refusing to fight. Sam still believes he can somehow get through to this person. Because it’s all about that storyline was really about unpacking what is it to be a hero today.
It’s no longer the soldier-warrior paradigm, which it was in the original Captain America. It’s now first responders, front line workers—it’s expanded to be quite a different definition. That’s the journey we were trying to take our guys on. This new definition is not about just beating the sh*t out of your opponent but finding out what your opponent is fighting for. Then, you can either you can bring them away from the dark side, or at least tackle what they’re fighting for and extinguish the negative side to it. In each case, you break it down and you figure out what the DNA of the character is behind every scene, and what every scene wants to be talking about.
Did you vary filming techniques when dealing with the main characters?
I tried to have an experiential quality to the camerawork. So in the first episode, the Bucky storyline with his psychologist, that used very intense camera angles because we were in the prison of his brain. Whereas with Sam, we were following him. The camera was moving and hand-held at times, it was fluid. Then that merges by episode two because we’re with them both. I also tried what I call ping pong editing, to eliminate edits, so it felt more fluid as compared to cutting back and forth. I also tried to make it as cinematic as possible, not just in the big shots, but in any close coverage. I liked to stack people and get a sense of depth so you get more information, versus just a single shot. You get as much information off dialogue as you get on dialogue.
Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel Studios
The series not only feels grittier than most Marvel films, but it also nods at what’s going on in the real world. Can you talk about that?
This is set after Avengers: Endgame, which was a big, other-worldly spectacle, so this wanted to be the absolute opposite of that. So as much grit as I could put it into without falling outside the Marvel paradigm so it really felt grounded visually. We used light flares and things to dirty up the imagery and give it organic energy that made it feel a little messier. We couldn’t have predicted the pandemic, of course, and we began shooting before that, so when we shut down for a bit we used the time very wisely and continued to edit. All the themes that were naturally a part of the series were all now becoming more heightened. The unrest in the U.S. around the Black Lives Matter protests made our story so much more poignant in its relevancy because it’s a discussion we all need to have and continue to have, so we sharpened our pencils where we needed to, which was mostly in little character opportunities to embrace elements. With our lead characters, like Karli (Erin Kellyman) and even the John Walker character, we kept calibrating them.
The John Walker character is more nuanced than just being a fascist Captain America—but he’s sure no Steve Rogers.
He’s really suffering from more of Imposter’s Syndrome, right? The opening scene in episode two where we get his nervousness, and we see him as a real human, is a great setup. It was Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president]’s idea, to really get inside of him, and then he goes onto the whirlwind tour, but we know underneath all that is this real person with fear.
The series begins to reveal John Walker’s character deficits while it simultaneously shows Sam Wilson’s inherent decency.
Yes, and when we see John Walker get crushed by the Dora Milage and he’s feeling not just vulnerable, but he’s realizing he might not have what it takes physically or even mentally, that’s when we hear that story of the medals he won and he refers to it as “the worst day of my life.” We realize something happened that was not right, those medals were maybe not deserved. He even says to the tribunal, “You made me, and now you’re abandoning me.” I think that’s true of a lot of soldiers who feel like they were following orders, and now you’re telling me that was the wrong thing to have done? I think those were all the nuances that add up to a guy who wants to do the right thing, but he doesn’t have inside his soul. He’s got some kind of switch in there that he’s not able to control, and it comes out in the worst of ways.
There are so many iconic shots in this series—John Walker’s blood-covered Captain America shield stands out as one jaw-dropper.
We made very careful planning because they were supposed to be shocking. On the one hand, we were deconstructing and staining what that shield had been. We just tearing it apart to the point where it could no longer be. That was really four episodes of finding out what that shield means to everybody. That shield is a metaphor for the flag, so it means something different for everybody, so really understanding where we were going with it when he uses the shield as a weapon of destruction. That was really important to get that right, and also for it to be bloody. It had to have some gore, but of course, we couldn’t actually show the level of violence we were portraying, so we wanted to make it suggestive. Your imagination plays a bigger part.
Another iconic image—Sam Wilson finally taking on the role of Captain America—tell me about building to that moment.
Lots of discussions went into that final image with Sam. The planning for the costume itself was months of very detailed work, and of course, that was based on the comic, we pulled from that iconic image and the history of that character.
Based on the graphic novels by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely, Netflix’s new superhero epic Jupiter’s Legacy is a century-spanning origin story and contemporary action tale in one. When we meet Sheldon, the Utopian (Josh Duhamel), and Grace, aka Lady Liberty (Leslie Bibb), they seem like any ordinary if well-off older rural couple, drinking wine, clad in plaid and fretting over disagreements with their grown kids.
Shel and Grace, however, are two of the six foundational members of a group endowed with extraordinary powers way back during the Great Depression and tasked since then with using their acquired supernatural abilities to keep the world safe. Unfortunately, with their son Brandon (Andrew Horton) questioning Shel’s inflexible adherence to a moral code he deems out of date and their hard-partying daughter Chloe (Elena Kampouris) barely on speaking terms with her parents at all, upholding the Union of Justice status quo, training the next generation, and maintaining a functional family life are three tasks that Shel and Grace, along with Shel’s brother, mind-reading superhero Walter (Ben Daniels), are having a hell of a time staying on top of. In addition to their personal and organizational woes, an enormous brute known as Blackstar seems to have escaped prison and is out for good-guy superhero blood.
This complex season, developed by Steven S. DeKnight, takes a wide-ranging approach to the universe it introduces, toggling between the Union’s origin story and its present-day challenges, from powerfully violent villains and wayward daughters to weighty infighting over the Union’s own existential future. Lizz Wolf, the series’ costume designer, was brought on early to help shape the characters’ foundational aesthetic, from their supersuits to their 1920s period gear. We spoke with Wolf about working across superhero, vintage, and contemporary fashion, tying these looks together within each character and building a highly technical, character-driven superhero wardrobe from scratch.
How much did you look at superhero costume tropes and how much did you let these characters’ personalities dictate their costuming?
There’s really a huge over-saturation of the genre, and I think we have very sophisticated audiences who are looking for something fresh. Mark Millar and Frank Quitely created this vast universe—it’s multigenerational, multicultural, with very complex characters. I wanted all those things to resonate in the design language. There was just so much to do to delineate each of these factions — we had superheroes, villains, robots, wizards, and different generations. The mythology of how the Union’s supersuits come to be was really the leaping-off point. With that, I relied heavily on science and nature to guide that inspiration. The biggest detail we created was the phenomenon of particles dancing around to create mathematical shapes and patterns, basically driven by sound waves. That was the most incredible find, along with —this is going to sound crazy, but this is where the details come in — amateur photography of frozen ice crystals. Those two things fused together became our language, and we created that into an alphabet. We put that into each character, and it’s expressed differently in each of the costumes, but it basically created each character’s own sacred geometry, if you will. Minutiae, I know, but it’s really vital, in telling an origin story like this, that we get those details right.
How did you bring out the differences between the older and younger generations of superheroes in the costume design?
We have a generational divide between the Union and the next generation, and they were completely built from inspiration from sneaker tech. That was another big aha moment. I’d found some industrial videos on flyknit technology that was developed for Nike. One of the things it had said was that it had infinite possibilities, was virtually seamless, breathable, and acts like a second skin. I just thought, well, when you’re looking at a sneaker, they are 100% pieces of artwork—very vibrant, with a lot of depth. That really bolstered our designs and inspiration. Our next generation is all inspired by that.
Using such technical materials seems like a ton of work.
It was a painstaking effort. The directive from me from the very beginning was that we really wanted to do things in a new way. We did not want to go down the road of ‘let’s just buy some spandex and print it and be satisfied with that.’ Taking that flyknit technology further, we had incredible luck and were able to find the people who developed this technology and collaborate with them. There’s a character named Phase Out and her costume is woven by those innovators. It’s 100% that flyknit—multi-dimensional, seamless, and it was a total breakthrough moment. It’s a first of its kind of suit. I’d like to see it become the future of superhero costumes. Beyond that, nothing was raw goods. Everything was printed on, embossed, turned over, painted, embellished. You would not recognize any of the raw fabrics we used on any of the costumes.
You also designed for a period piece. How was traveling back to the Roaring 20s and the Dust Bowl?
Hardly anybody asks about the good old period! It’s a crazy time in history to amass research on because there’s a complete wheel of different things going. The Dust Bowl, the effects of the stock market crash, the economic impact that had on people. And then we have that juxtaposed with people who are still thriving in the Jazz Age, the finery of men’s suits, women’s fashion completely changing in those years. One of the big things about that is that getting to know these characters as the people they were in 1929 is vital to understanding them as superheroes. We made almost everything for all of our principal characters. Trying to divide my time between the dominant superhero universe, the intricate period world, and the contemporary sphere was really a huge challenge. Those three concurrent worlds got fused together. I had 120 people, three countries, two shops, everything was divided.
In the present day, Chloe is the most standout character in terms of costume. What was a leaping-off point for her?
She’s a highly complex, very unpredictable, rebellious character who’s very much a superhero in her own right despite rejecting everything her parents stand for. I think her clothing choices really speak loudly to her internal battles. She wears nothing that symbolizes the latent superhero powers that she holds. She has a total disdain for it, so it wasn’t appropriate to bring it in at all. I think in one of the big moments in our trailer you see her in what feels like a superhero look, but that’s a satirical thing going on inside our story. Her outrageous streetwear is her costume. It’s a mashup between editorial fashion looks, street chic, and what we referred to as floor couture—what’s recently been thrown on the floor from the night before and becomes a newly formed look the next day. We delineated all these different sub-groups inside the show because the world is absolutely littered with superheroes with varying degrees of powers. She’s the reluctant figurehead of what we called the in-crowd, which is basically a band of partying, ambivalent, materialistic young adults who are socially at the top. And she’s a supermodel. In the comics, she’s basically depicted in not much more than a pair of boy-shorts and a crop top, and we took the residual makeup and spiky hair and came up with a different way to express that.
On the other side, we’ve got pared-down Hutch and his pals.
Part of the thing with Hutch is that he and Shockwave, Nutrino, and Jack Frost are in a gang, if you will. They were part of a group we call the antis. Originally I had a really moody color palette in mind inspired by lomography [a genre of photography, involving taking spontaneous photographs with minimal attention to technical details] and 1980s polaroids. For Hutch specifically, I wanted his clothes to be transient, used beyond their expiration, and repurposed. Without any intentional style or assembly, he just went for it. I had this idea that any of the things the group holds precious might have been lifted off other people in very nefarious circumstances. They’re attached to shiny things and grabbing at them just to say they can take them from you. They’re definitely the counter culture.
Did you use color to divide between the eras at all?
For the superheroes, we were trying to create an emotional color palette with their suits and in the period world, though we stuck to a more period-accurate look, we tend to see these things through the lens of old photos so our mind is predisposed to thinking it’s that way. Color palettes are really created broadly for all three of these worlds. Sometimes they hook up. That’s what costume designing is, it’s telling stories, and we hope that people see these things. This show is so unbelievably epic and a full-bodied experience. There’s a lot of investment people put in a show like this—we’ve gone full tilt in an origin story, and that’s just a rare opportunity.
“Oh, greatest of kings…let one of your knights try to land a blow against me. Indulge me in this game.” So says the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), leveling the challenge that lies at the heart of writer/director David Lowery’s hotly-anticipated film. Who should take up the challenge but Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s headstrong nephew, a young would-be knight who might not lack courage, but he certainly lacks for epic tales to tell. In the official trailer for Lowery’s The Green Knight, we see the Green Knight issue the challenge, Gawain accepts, and then voila!—the latter delivers the killing blow, separating the Green Knight’s head from his body. But this is the only beginning of the story.
The Green Knight, it turns out, is not made of mortal stuff. The second part of his challenge was that after someone lands a blow against him, he gets to take his revenge a year later. Although Gawain decapitates him in the opening seconds of the trailer, the Green Knight survives, and rides off, laughing, holding his head. Intrigued yet?
This is the longest look yet we’ve had at Lowery’s film, and the vision displayed here is as haunting, beautiful, and beguiling as we’d expected from the director of the melancholy mini-masterpiece A Ghost Story. The mythical Green Knight isn’t the only wonder revealed here—there are giants, talking foxes, and more for Gawain to encounter on his quest. When he has a run-in with Joel Edgerton’s Lord, he explains the whole reason he’s taking all this on is “honor”—it’s why a knight does what he does, no matter how clearly fatal his decision is.
The Green Knight boasts a stellar cast. Joining Patel and Edgerton are Alicia Vikander, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Berry Keoghan, and Erin Kellyman (who just shined in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier).
Check out the trailer below. The Green Knight hits theaters on July 30.
Here’s the official synopsis from A24:
An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men. Gawain contends with ghosts, giants, thieves, and schemers in what becomes a deeper journey to define his character and prove his worth in the eyes of his family and kingdom by facing the ultimate challenger. From visionary filmmaker David Lowery comes a fresh and bold spin on a classic tale from the knights of the round table.
The first major bit of casting news for Rian Johnson’s sequel to his 2019 hit Knives Out is here—Deadlinereports that Dave Bautista is joining Daniel Craig in Knives Out 2, reuniting the pair for the first time since they appeared together in 2015’s Spectre. Netflix scooped up Knives Out 2 and 3 in a deal that was reportedly worth more than $400 million. Johnson will write, direct, and produce the sequel, with Craig returning to the role of the silky detective Benoit Blanc.
If you’re wondering just who Bautista will be playing and what murderous chicanery Knives Out 2 will get into, you will likely be unsurprised to find out both details are being kept tightly under wraps. What you can be sure about is Craig’s Benoit Blanc will be plunged into a murder mystery involving a large ensemble of potential suspects, and that Bautista will have plenty to work with, both in terms of the script and the rest of the cast, whoever they may be.
Speaking of the cast, in the original film, they appeared to be having the times of their lives. From Chris Evans’ portrayal of the happily amoral Ransom Drysdale (both his name and his chunky knit sweater were perfect) to Toni Collette’s scene-stealing performance as the tipsy Joni Thrombey, there seemed to be palpable joy in making the film. Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ana de Armas, the late, great Christopher Plummer, and recent Best Actor Oscar nominee LaKeith Stanfield were all on point. There’s no doubt Johnson will surround Craig with a similarly star-studded cast, and Bautista gets the honor of being the first to take the field.
Bautista is a busy guy—he’s already involved in a big Netflix film, Zack Snyder’s zombie thriller Army of the Dead, is in Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated Duneremake, has a role in Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, and will reprise his role as Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Featured image: Actor Dave Bautista at The World Premiere of Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 at Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, CA April 19th, 2017 (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Disney)
For All Mankind, the Apple TV prestige drama that presents an alternate history of NASA and mid-century American space exploration takes a darker turn in its second season. Previously, having been beaten by the Soviets to the moon, the Americans handily caught up, establishing a tiny lunar base called Jamestown and even achieving gender parity in the astronaut ranks. At the start of Season 2, a decade has passed and both nations’ space programs have grown by leaps and bounds, with the moon now home to complex bases and competitive mining operations. On the U.S. side, there’s talk of reaching Mars, while together, the rival states are planning a friendly photo-op demonstrating their partnership and cooperation, set in space.
Life on Earth has changed, too. Astronaut Ed (Joel Kinnaman) is a desk jockey running NASA’s astronaut program. Ellen (Jodi Balfour) is a national hero and rising NASA organizational star, but staying in the closet is becoming too much to bear. Having lost it on the moon at the end of Season 1, Gordo (Michael Dorman) is drinking heavily, while his ex, Tracy (Sarah Jones) has remarried and fully blossomed as a celebrity astronaut. Her more conservative BFF and Ed’s wife, Karen (Shantel VanSanten) has finally built an identity for herself aside from being Ed Baldwin’s wife—she bought and now runs the Outpost, everyone’s favorite astronaut watering hole. The action toggles back and forth between Jamestown camaraderie, Soviet threats, and mid-century modern suburban angst.
Whether we’re in the NASA conference room, Gordo’s living room, or a lunar base, For All Mankind’s spaces are practically womb-like, cozy, and separate from the rest of the world. On Earth, cinematographerStephen McNutt drew from reality. During the late 60s through the early 80s, when the show is set, homes “were these comfortable little microcosms, as long as you had the money to do it,” the DP, who himself grew up in the 60s, says. “The colors were warm, the wardrobe was warm—everything was kind of warm and glowy.” The DP used low light levels and even moonlight for fill in order to achieve a soft, natural sense of lighting in the characters’ homes.
Joel Kinnaman in season two of “For All Mankind,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
As for fluorescent-lit offices at NASA headquarters, “I just couldn’t do it,” McNutt says. Whether Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) and Tom (Dan Donohue) are conferring on the latest space program whims handed down by President Kennedy in the show’s first season or Reagan in the second, the heady discussions take place in hushed, serene offices with subtle lighting to match. For McNutt, it wasn’t just a matter of making the lighting feel good. “The show is about the universe, it’s about space, it’s about sunlight, it’s about moonlight,” he says, and the earthly spaces needed to thematically support the series’ grander picture.
Michael Dorman and Sarah Jones in “For All Mankind,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
One major upgrade this season was the moon. The first moon was shot on a smaller space on Stage 27 at Sony Studios, the same site of Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz—the show’s lander was even placed within a foot of the spot where Dorothy’s foot first touches the yellow brick road. This season, production was in a Boeing production plant. “The approach to the moon was actually quite simple—it was a matter of controlling the sun that was the hard part,” McNutt says. A 100,000 watt soft light did the trick, after hitting the right distance to keep it far enough from the surface of the moon to prevent a fall-off effect. To direct the light, the grips used curtains to build what functioned like an iris around the light.
Season two of “For All Mankind,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
And of course, there’s space. The dim halls of the Jamestown base are relatively peaceful until a catastrophic error on the U.S. side brings armed Soviet astronauts to their windows. The cozy sense of calm throughout most of the other sets makes the moon base breach at the end of Episode 9 is all the more jarring. “At that point, we hadn’t had any real action in the show,” McNutt points out. “We talked about that for a long time, because we wanted this guy to shoot the window, and we had to be careful with not being too outrageously crazy against what would really happen up there.” Having already established a lighting color scheme for safe pressurization (green) and lack of atmosphere (red), McNutt made the switch, literally. “I was on a button hitting the strobes—the strobes, in my opinion, made the thing really rock.” The base’s orderly atmosphere is gone in an instant, supplies and furniture and technical gear flying through the broken pane as the astronauts, caught off guard, cling to what remains of the interior. “We talk about every single one of those pieces ad nauseam,” the cinematographer says. “Once you design the movement of everybody, how they’re grabbing, falling down, reaching, and you know you’re going to cover all those things, you just shoot it and in the end, it turns out pretty well.” The slowed-down effect of walking on the moon’s surface was replicated by shooting 32 frames per second, but inside the base, the outside world catches up with Jamestown’s astronauts all too fast. Can a national space program ever really be neutral? In the show’s Season 3, it looks like the situation at NASA is primed to get even more complex.
Featured image: “For All Mankind,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
“Rules: No eating people.” This is the first thing you see when the Venom: Let There Be Carnage” official trailer begins, and it’s a good rule of thumb for anyone, but especially Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). The last time we saw Brock, he had eaten several people on the course of becoming a proper anti-hero in director Ruben Fleischer’s 2018 Venom, which introduced one of the most beloved bizarro characters in the Marvel canon. Now multi-talented actor/director Andy Serkis is at the helm of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and there’s a tremendous amount of excitement about that fact and more. Brock has gotten his alien symbiote under some semblance of control that he—really, they—are able to make breakfast together, and the meal isn’t a human head. Unfortunately, Venom could still learn a thing or two about how to properly plate food. And use a ketchup bottle.
As the title makes clear, Brock and his live-in buddy Venom will have to deal with another alien symbiote, Carnage, who has caught a ride with a human host by the name of Cletus Kasday (Woody Harrelson). We met Cletus at the end of Venom, and we can be sure he has no plans on keeping Carnage in check the way Eddie tries to do with Venom. Part of the fun of Venom was watching Brock wrestle with his alien symbiote and try, often in vain, to make him obey Eddie’s sense of morality. Add to that large challenge a vicious rival, and Serkis’s immense skills behind the camera, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage becomes one of those films we’ll be extra excited about seeing on the big screen.
Bringing unique worlds to life is production designer Gemma Jackson’s stock-in-trade. So, she didn’t hesitate when offered the opportunity to create the look for The Nevers, the Victorian-era sci-fi series that debuted on HBO in April.
“I think what drew me was a remarkably interesting script and an extraordinary storyline that I’d never read the likes of before,” says Jackson from her home in England during a Zoom interview. “It was predominantly women—women-led—which was a bit of a turn-on. I was an admirer of Joss from, you know, all sorts of things. It just got to me on some level. It was irresistible, actually.”
Ella Smith in “The Nevers.” Photograph by Keith Bernstein/HBO
Set in London at the end of the 19th century, The Nevers injects a science fiction twist into the Victorian era with an action-packed adventure involving a group of women who discover they have extraordinary powers after a mysterious alien encounter. Referred to as “the Touched,” each woman has a different ability. One can see the future. Another creates fireballs in the palm of her hand. A third sends heavy objects sailing through the air… and so on. As society rebels against them, “the Touched” come to realize their gifts are also a curse, threatening their very existence.
Unfolding in a 12-episode arc, the first six episodes of season one will finish airing in May. Filming begins for the remaining episodes in June. Philippa Goslett will take the reins as showrunner following Joss Whedon’s departure.
One main challenge was creating a world where horse-drawn carriages, cobblestone streets, and corsets are colliding with motorized cars, the telephone, and electric lights.
“That in itself has an incredibly exciting feel about it,” says Jackson. “One of the biggest times of change that ever happened. My grandmother saw it all.”
Jackson wanted the design to be as historically accurate as possible while still taking advantage of the story’s possibilities. “I usually do a lot of research, to begin with. Then you have to close those books and go on that journey and just create,” Jackson adds. “The intention is always to be real. We’re very careful about things. I think the minute you start doing a weird set or a fantasy set, you lose everyone. It doesn’t work.”
The Emmy-winning designer credits a strong team of concept artists for helping to fuel her vision. They’d sketch. Ideas would take shape. And based on feedback, Jackson would get a sense of what worked. “You go in that direction and something emerges,” she continues. “Hopefully, it gradually takes on a form all its own.”
A suggestion from Whedon led to a key design decision. He wanted the alleyways of London to be as tight as possible. The hems of the Victorian dresses should be brushing up against the sides of the buildings. Jackson took the concept a step further and scaled everything down. As an example, she describes a square needed for an upcoming episode. Her quest to go small took her north to the London area of Hampstead.
Anna Devlin, Ann Skelly in “The Nevers.” Courtesy HBO Max.
“It’s got a lot of nooks and crannies and everything is slightly smaller,” Jackson explains. “I live in Saint John’s Wood and it’s quite elegant, sort of Regency. In Hampstead, you go and there’s like one little front door and then there’s another just slightly next to it or a little alleyway down the back. It’s an absolutely perfect reference for what we seemingly did unconsciously. We’ve created a London that’s a slightly different scale from real London. It just feels a little bit off-key which I’m quite pleased with.”
After the pandemic upended the production schedule and closed down some planned locations, Jackson realized more builds would be needed. A space in West London’s Park Royal was secured. It housed such locales as the orphanage run by Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), a “Touched” woman who offers refuge to the orphaned “Touched;” the Bidlow Estate, home to Lavinia Bidlow (Olivia Williams), who funds the orphanage; and the Ferryman’s Club, a sexual den of iniquity run by the debauched Hugo Swann (James Norton).
“This place is like elastic. It gives and gives,” says Jackson. “And then it’s got this huge backlot around it so you can just build lots more stuff to accommodate all the various demands.”
The Biglow estate on “The Nevers.” Courtesy HBO Max.
Limited options pushed Jackson to be even more inventive than usual. One of her favorite moves was transforming a police station, which served as the base of operations for gruff Inspector Frank Mundi (Ben Chaplin), into an asylum. “That was one of those incredibly satisfying things as a designer,” she says. “You’ll never recognize it was the same place. Well, now I’ve told you, so maybe you will. But it was one of those, ‘Yes, we’ve done it!’ You’re thrown for a loop and you rise to the occasion.”
One of The Nevers’ most imaginative sets — the laboratory of Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) — was also built in Park Royal. Amalia’s second-in-command, Penance has the special ability to understand and harness electricity. It helps her invent many of the futuristic devices she and Amalia use to protect “the Touched” from harm. Her laboratory is brimming with examples of her efforts.
Ann Skelly in “The Nevers.” Photograph by Keith Bernstein/HBO
“I have to say that Tina Jones, my set decorator, did a huge amount of that,” says Jackson. “And all her nerdy boys in the model department. They loved making all of it. The thing was to try and visualize as much as possible. So we had things like this beautiful blue cylinder to actually show the existence of electricity. We wanted to show Penance’s sense of constant inquiry. It was just fun trying to think about all the things she could do and to make the building breathe in a way.”
Zackary Momoh, Viola Prette John, Anne Skelly, Elizabeth Berrington, Kiran Sawar. Photograph by Keith Bernstein/HBO
Chatham, a town two hours south of London, was used for many of The Nevers street scenes, including a spirited chase in episode one featuring Penance’s newly invented motorized car. Storefronts were taken back in time by hooking 19th-century facades over them. When pressed for details about just what facade hooking entails, Jackson answers with a smile. “Oh, that’s a professional secret. I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
A street in Chatham in “The Nevers.” Courtesy HBO Max.
Jackson adds that visual effects supervisor John H. Han pitched in with a digital assist. “He could extend my streets and give my buildings more height. We got the landscape of old London.”
After an extended break that saw her work on The Outfit, an upcoming film set in 1950s Chicago, Jackson is excited about returning to The Nevers and bringing the remaining story to life.
“I’m not always so pleased with things I do, but I’m really happy with this,” says Jackson. “It was just a pleasant experience. And the fact that it has come out so well and that people are loving it so much is fabulous. I mean that is all you really want, isn’t it?”
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Prince Akeem is one of Eddie Murphy’s most famous roles, but the opinionated barber Clarence is one of the funniest jokes in Coming to America. Stars Murphy and Arsenio Hall arguing with themselves in transformative prosthetics at a New York City barbershop was a surprise to theater audiences. The cameos were crowd-pleasers and captured the culture of men socializing endlessly at their local haircutter, but the scenes emphasized the “boys club” nature of barbershops.
Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha) emerges as the royal stylist in a more heartfelt and substantial role in the sequel Coming 2 America. She even professes her dream of opening her own barbershop and scoffs when Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler) asserts that women own “beauty shops.” Celebrity barber and Co-head of the Hair Department for Coming 2 AmericaStacey Morris has faced similar biases in her career.
She picked up the scissors to style her brothers’ hair at age 12 and her talent was instantly apparent. Morris’s father and stepfather both worked in the music industry and her mother was a successful model. She was accustomed to having entertainers in their home as a child and her father would convince them to let Morris cut their hair. “Some of them would be like, ‘Really, this 14-year-old girl?’ You know what I’m saying?” Morris recalled. “Because doing men’s hair, especially back then, it was a man’s world. I was breaking down that barrier and spoiling sexism with that.”
Co-hair department Vera Steimberg, Wesley Snipes, and co-hair department head Stacey Morris.
Looking back on an explosive career, it’s difficult to imagine that Morris spent years cutting hair as a hobby. Independent at an early age, she once had dreams of becoming a veterinarian. After losing a job at age 20, she began cutting friends’ hair for nominal fees, usually under five dollars. “Whatever somebody wanted to give me or tip me. I realized I can pay my bills with this money,” Morris remembered. “I started doing that on the side. Still underground, hadn’t gone to school, had never had any formal training.”
A neighbor noticed Morris’s house was full of activity and asked her what went on there. It turned out that her reputation had preceded her. The man said he recognized Morris’s name and had been following her career. He revealed that a barber he knew was interested in her work and he connected them.
“This guy owned a shop at the time in Beverly Hills,” Morris said. “He was an African American man, but he was also a choreographer. He did stuff like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson, so he had that whole entertainment world. I went and met with him. He was like, ‘Listen, I want you here.’” Morris was reluctant to take a position with no formal training and had not previously considered being a stylist as a long-term career. “He got me into his shop and from there, my clientele grew into basically where I am now.”
Teddy Riley, Mike Tyson, Will Smith, Puffy, Riddick Bowe, and more stepped through that Beverly Hills door. She now boasts a seemingly endless roster of A-list clientele including Anthony Anderson, Alfonso Ribeiro, and Anthony Mackie. She also started clipping Eddie Murphy’s hair and has been his personal barber for more than two decades.
Morris works with clients to help them look their best every day, but also crosses over to shape their style on screen. Her film and TV credits include Sylvie’s Love, Gone Girl, Norbit,Dreamgirls, and Black-ish. She earned three Emmy nominations for her work on The Voice. Her creative vision helps the actors feel more comfortable in their role because they are confident that they look the part.
“If you think about Eddie Murphy and he does all these different characters and stuff, part of him being able to become that character is how he feels and how he looks,” Morris explained. “We handle that and he does the rest. We help him bring that character to life. Whether it’s your hair on your head or whether it’s facial hair or even our eyebrows. All those different things, those little nuances, change your appearance and how you’re perceived and what you represent.”
Eddie Murphy is one of the most famous faces in Hollywood, but he has made some of the most radical transformations on screen. However, he may be most difficult to recognize by what he takes off rather than what he puts on. “It’s funny because we did Bowfinger and he had a little tiny mustache,” Morris recalled. “When it was over, he was like, ‘How do I get rid of this?’ I said, ‘Let’s just cut it off and let it come back.’ It was the first time he had cut his mustache. People didn’t recognize him. He was like, ‘I am my mustache?’”
Morris’s designs in Coming 2 America alongside co-head of hair design, Carla Farmer, and principal wig maker, Justin Stanford, are stunning. The styles are lavish and whimsical and indulged more in the films’ fictional African nations. “With Wesley Snipes, I knew that his character was much different than the Zamundans,” Morris explained. “He was from Nexdoria, which is a little looser. They’re a little more urban in Africa. They’re a little more thuggish. I knew you could do something that wasn’t so refined and stiff and supposed to be regal and neat and pressed. With him, I took it upon myself to play on that and use his character.”
Biopic Dolemite is My Name also featured some outrageous looks but was grounded in the true lives of the characters the film is based on. As Rudy Ray Moore’s (Murphy) alter ego “Dolemite” took shape, he developed a more sensational persona. “If you notice the progression, the hair tells a story in that movie,” Morris pointed out. “When he started, he was one way. He had that little short Afro that was just him. It was kind of receding and going thin. That was a wig, too. Then he gets his first wig. Well he didn’t have money, so it didn’t make sense for him to have a good wig, so it was this synthetic, cheesy, hokey wig. And then as he started to make it and had more money, his wig looked a little more expensive.”
Eddie Murphy is Rudy Ray More in ‘Dolemite is My Name.’ Courtesy Netflix.Eddie Murphy is Rudy Ray More in ‘Dolemite is My Name.’ Courtesy Netflix.
Fans will soon be able to see Morris’ amazing work in person. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles will host a Dolemite exhibit beginning this September. Morris provided them with busts she used for Murphy that are actual molds of the actor and other artifacts from the film.
Of course, hair doesn’t just grow on our heads. Beyond even beards and eyebrows, Morris has to be ready to work with it all. “There are all kinds of stuff,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe it. There might be a pool scene that was set in the 70s and back then it was hippie and you might need hair under a person’s arm or more pubic hair showing in their bathing suit. That’s called a merkin, by the way. There are all kinds of pieces that are made and different tools that you use to apply and remove products.”
The goal for Morris isn’t always glamour. She took home a Makeup and Hair Stylists Guild Award for her work on a State Farm commercial featuring Alfonso Ribeiro doing a shoddy impression of Chris Paul. “It’s not about the perfect look or most beautiful. He was supposed to be a bad version. Right? He was an impersonator of Chris Paul. The director was like, ‘It’s too good. You’ve gotta make it worse. I should be able to see the bald cap.’ We did all of that and we pulled it off. He still looked good, but it was like, this is not Chris Paul. I had to create a good bad version.”
So many of Morris’s clients are on a global stage that has a real influence on the culture. Morris said it’s important for her work to be observant and understand what is happening in the streets. “It’s interesting because I don’t set the trends,” Morris said. “They start at a grassroots level, but they don’t get seen. I say this all the time, but before Michael Jackson, we were moonwalking in the kitchen. But then he did it on screen and it became a thing and everybody was moonwalking. We had been moonwalking. I make sure to stay connected to the community and to the grassroots level and my clients and stuff like that. I don’t create it, but once I do it, it gets seen because of their celebrity and it becomes the trend. People want to look like them and then it becomes widespread.”
Morris’s path has been remarkable. Her talent has been so widely known that people kept knocking on her door, even when she couldn’t yet imagine where her career would take her. “It’s amazing to just have something,” she said. “I didn’t even realize the value in it or how unique or really, how good I was at it. It just happened and opportunities kept presenting themselves. Just like they always say, an opportunity is not an opportunity if you’re not prepared, and somehow I was always prepared for the next thing, the next opportunity.”
Based on the 2013 graphic novel created by writer Mark Millar and artist Frank Quitely, the new Netflix original series Jupiter’s Legacy tells the story of both the first generation of superheroes, that have worked to keep the world safe for nearly a century, and their children, who are expected to pick up the torch. Some may not quite ready to handle the burden, and some actively reject their legacies. Josh Duhamel stars as Sheldon Sampson, aka The Utopian, who, along with his wife Grace aka Lady Liberty (Leslie Bibb), led the superheroes of The Union. All members of The Union must follow The Code: don’t kill, and don’t get involved in human politics. The season’s 8 episodes follow these characters, shifting back and forth in a non-linear timeline. In 1930s Depression-era America, the original 6 moves towards the moment they get their powers. In the present day, Sheldon’s children Brandon (Andrew Horton), daughter Chloe (Elena Kampouris), as well as other characters with special powers but unclear intentions, deal with the legendary reputations of the older generation and struggle with growing superpowers, family dynamics, dangerous secrets, and their own demons.
The Credits spoke to composerStephanie Economou about creating the score for this hybrid of complex family drama, morality tale, and epic origin story. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Jupiter’s Legacy premieres today on Netflix.
Stephanie Economou
In what way did you connect to the themes in the storytelling of Jupiter’s Legacy when you embarked on writing the score? What was your vision for it from the beginning?
My goal, because the narrative is so vast in scope and scale, there are so many characters, and its non-linear storytelling, was to establish themes or musical signatures for a lot of our main characters. The biggest thing for me was sitting down and writing a theme for Sheldon, The Utopian, and that actually ended up being magnified and becoming the theme for The Union, and the show theme. The Utopian really embodies all of those traditional aspects and morals of The Code. There’s that old trope-y sense of the superhero in him, and so that theme really presents itself quite traditionally sometimes on solo French horn, or a brass section, or orchestra. I did that quite intentionally because I wanted to subvert expectations. Yes, The Utopian is this mythic figure in a way, but the way we see him much of the time is not so much the guy who’s saving the day, but the guy who, in his older age, is struggling with his relationships with his children, and his wife and brother, and with the world’s perception of him. So there’s a sense of this overly heroic nature of his theme in certain ways, but pivoting. On a more minimal level, we hear his theme on acoustic guitar. We really do experience these dark moments with him, so it was important for his theme to be able to expand and contract in that way, so we can have different interpretations or paintings of what this man is. That became the show’s theme because I was able to fragment it in different ways, depending on where we are in the story.
You represented the younger generation with less traditional instrumentation.
Chloe, Sheldon’s daughter, has an industrial rock theme. She really demanded that. She’s a rebel. She’s so incredibly powerful, but she doesn’t use her powers. She doesn’t believe in what The Union represents. It just demanded a different palate for her, but at the same time, we don’t just see her fighting, we see her in some very dark moments where she struggles with drug addiction. It was important for her theme to be able to do the same thing that Sheldon’s did, which was to be told on a more minimal, sensitive, intimate scale. So you’ll hear her theme not only on blazing guitars and synths, but on gamelans, bells, and piano. It’s still the same theme that’s on the guitars, but it’s told from a different perspective. That one was really fun to write.
Tell us about some of the other characters’ signature themes.
Hutch has this growl stinger. We don’t really know a lot about his character. We don’t know if he’s insidious or what he’s up to so that just seemed to fit his movements and personality. Raikou is probably my favorite character in the series. There are so many wonderful, powerful female characters in this show. I loved being able to write music that had a different profile for them. Raikou has this great stylized action sequence in Episode 7, and I wanted to give her a signature that didn’t sound like anything else in the score, so I called up a trumpet player friend of mine, Jake Baldwin, and I said, ‘Hey, listen. Can you just make some really weird sounds into the mouthpiece of your trumpet, like make bendy, strange little sounds?’ That became the signature for Raikou, and it just follows her around.
There’s also definitely an aspect in the score that feels like we’re on a grand adventure.
The adventure theme I wrote is really important. It’s pretty much everywhere throughout the score. It started as something that I wanted to use to pick up the energy as the origin story was going in the past timelines, but it’s also in the present day because everything is still evolving and bubbling under the surface. Sometimes that’s on a harp, and sometimes on a theremin, or the short strings in an action sequence. Having these thematic ideas in the fiber of the score really helped to shape the storytelling, because it’s such an epic tale.
The score feels like it’s telling one story, not differentiating between past and current events, which was a really great choice.
There was specific attention paid to that idea. The showrunner didn’t want the music in the past to sound like it was from the 20s and 30s. It was really important to feel cohesive as one thing. We are with the characters over the course of a hundred years, so it’s important to feel like musically we are developing with them, and not completely pivoting stylistically.
You’re a hybrid composer. How much of the score is live, and what is electronic or created with sampled sounds?
A lot of it was programmed. I didn’t record a big orchestra. The big live ensemble I recorded was actually a choir. In episode 7, there’s a big chorale moment right before the original six characters are granted their powers. I planned that from the very beginning. That was something I had decided conceptually I wanted to be for that moment. Last year posed a big challenge for a lot of composers and performers because scoring sessions were touch and go for a long time. At the time where I had composed for the chorale specifically, it was back in August, and they still were not recording choirs in person. It wouldn’t be safe. That posed an interesting challenge. So I asked our choir contractor if he had a list of killer vocalists that have great home studio setups that could record themselves. He gathered nine amazing vocalists and they all multi-tracked themselves six times each.
That had to feel risky, not being able to be in the room.
You just never know how it’s going to turn out. Everyone was in a different space. They were also singing in Latin. I took text from Mark Millar’s original comic book series and translated it into Latin for the choir to sing. Not being in the same room with the people who are singing, it’s very hard to line up the consonants and plosives and get all the language together, and not being able to bounce your color and sound off of other people, it’s very challenging. They sent back the recordings, and I sent it over to a mixer, and 30 minutes later he sent back to me what’s in the track. It just felt like this huge, lush choir. It was really amazing. It’s unreal what they could accomplish in isolation in their own individual spaces at home.
There has never been a franchise in film history that’s wrecked as many cars in as many ways as Fast & Furious. This legacy of totaling every kind of automobile, truck, tractor-trailer and tank is on display in a new featurette for F9, the latest installment. It’s title, “Car-Nage” gets points for revving right at the pun and smashing it into it, Fast & Furious style. The video reveals just how much of the franchise is built around real stunts from seasoned stunt car drivers. While there are, of course, visual effects involved (F9 deploys a literal flying car), the heart of every Fast & Furious movie is in real people driving real cars in really terrifying ways.
F9 will be centered on a mano-y-mano brawl between franchise lead Dom (Vin Diesel) and his “forsaken” brother Jakob (John Cena). The nucleus of the franchise remains intact—Dom, Sung Kang’s Han (he’s back!), Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, Jordana Brewster’s Mia, Ludacris’s Tej Parker, and Tyrese Gibson’s Roman Pearce. F9 will once again put the family to the test, with Jakob Toretto willing to stop at nothing to step out of Dom’s shadow and punish him for, well, we’ll find out when the film premieres.
F9 is directed by Justin Lin, the most seasoned Fast & Furious director of them all. Check out the featurette below. F9 is slated for a June 25 release:
Here’s the official synopsis:
Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto is leading a quiet life off the grid with Letty and his son, little Brian, but they know that danger always lurks just over their peaceful horizon. This time, that threat will force Dom to confront the sins of his past if he’s going to save those he loves most. His crew joins together to stop a world-shattering plot led by the most skilled assassin and high-performance driver they’ve ever encountered: a man who also happens to be Dom’s forsaken brother, Jakob (John Cena). F9 sees the return of Justin Lin as director, who helmed the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters of the series when it transformed into a global blockbuster. The action hurtles around the globe—from London to Tokyo, from Central America to Edinburgh, and from a secret bunker in Azerbaijan to the teeming streets of Tbilisi. Along the way, old friends will be resurrected, old foes will return, history will be rewritten, and the true meaning of family will be tested like never before.
Featured image: Vin Diesel is Dom Torretto in “F9.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Yesterday we shared Paramount’s teaser for the final A Quiet Place Part II trailer, and today, as promised, Paramount has released the final trailer, and it delivers. Director John Krasinski’s long-awaited follow-up to his gangbusters 2018 film was due last March, but, well, you know what happened. The final trailer takes advantage of the fact that critics actually got to see the film last year—and they loved it—so you’ll get a few of their quotes here. Things like “This is the experience theaters were made for” and “Nerve-shredding” and “So worth the wait” are nearly as effective as the actual visuals.
But hoo boy do the visuals work. We’re once again plunged into the nightmare world that the surviving Abbotts live in. Having lost dad, Lee (Krasinski) in the first film, the remaining Abbotts—Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Marcus and Regan (Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds, respectively) and the baby born in the bathtub in that unforgettable scene from the 2018 film, find out they are not, in fact, the only survivors of the brutal alien attack. The final trailer shows the Abbotts making contact with other survivors (played by Cillian Murphy and Djimon Hounsou, no less), while the monsters are still out there, hunting and killing at the slightest hint of sound.
Krasinski’s long-awaited, much-delayed sequel is coming to theaters—and only theaters—on May 28. Check out the final trailer below:
Here’s the official synopsis from Paramount:
Following the deadly events at home, the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) must now face the terrors of the outside world as they continue their fight for survival in silence. Forced to venture into the unknown, they quickly realize that the creatures that hunt by sound are not the only threats that lurk beyond the sand path.
Featured image: L-r, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo credit: Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures.
David Oyelowo was looking for a very particular kind of project when he read Emma Needell’s script for The Water Man back in 2015. The veteran actor is a passionate fan of a specific kind of nuanced, expansive child-led films that one could argue had their heyday back in the 1980s. “The films I had loved growing up were E.T., The Goonies, Stand By Me,” Oyelowo says, “I wore the VHS down watching them.” For a certain generation (mine, for example), these were the films that sparked a lifelong love of movies. They also seem to represent a bit of a bygone era of kid’s movies, when the effects were largely practical, the stakes were highly personal, and the lines between fantasy and reality, between a child’s imagination and an adult’s refutation of such, was the stuff of movie magic.
With Needell’s script for The Water Man, Oyelowo found what he was looking for. So much so, in fact, he decided instead of just producing the film, he would make his directorial debut with it. Oyelowo now had his chance to make the kind of quest film that he’d loved as a kid. Gunner (Lonnie Chavis) heads off into the woods to try and find the titular Water Man in order to save his sick mother, Mary (Rosario Dawson). Enlisting the help of a mysterious girl about his same age, Jo (Amiah Miller), Gunner plunges into a dangerous world of howling wild horses and raging rivers, all in an effort to find a man who supposedly drowned, but rose from the dead, a hundred years ago. A great adventure ensues.
We spoke to Oyelowo, who also co-stars in the film, about being drawn into the world of The Water Man, what he learned about directing, and getting potent, emotionally nuanced performances from his child actors. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Oyelowo in a behind the scenes still from the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
Your film, much like The Goonies, is pretty epic in scope—you’ve got lots of outdoor shots, wild horses, a raging river, fire—tell me a bit about the production itself.
I wanted to be ambitious with it because I wanted that scope, not only because of the cinematic element but because of the terrain that is a child’s imagination. When you think about E.T., it starts small, it starts intimate. The father’s gone, the mother’s trying to deal with her kids who are wondering where’s dad, and then boom, adventure hits. With The Goonies, there in this small town, they’re all just messing about as kids, it’s looking like they’re going to lose their homes and their community is going to get broken up, and boom, adventure hits. Stand By Me, same thing. There’s a dead body somewhere, should we go find it? I don’t know, that’s a bit weird! Okay, let’s go! Adventure hits. So that’s the terrain of a child’s imagination where this weird close relationship between reality and fantasy exists, and it just makes for such incredible stories.
And in the case of Gunner, who’s a budding graphic novelist, his imagination spills out into the forest, which is very real and very dangerous.
You have to have terrain and scope that are commensurate with how a child sees the world. That’s how we zoned in on the Pacific Northwest as a place to shoot the film because we wanted a place that didn’t feel dependent on VFX for a child’s imagination. You don’t have those things for your imagination. Literally, a shadow on the back of your door when you’re going to bed, you cannot convince me that’s not the bogeyman. That’s the kind of thing I wanted to create with the film.
(L-R) Lonnie Chavis as Gunner Boone and Amiah Miller as Jo Riley in the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
How did you walk the line between Gunner’s imagination and the practical effects?
Some of it was to do with necessity being the mother of invention. In the script, originally, that sequence where we tell the Water Man’s story—as beautifully done by Alfred Molina—was a live-action sequence. Now that’s a very expensive sequence, with the dam breaking and the Water Man drowning, and it’s set a hundred years before our film is set. So the fact that Gunner is working on a graphic novel helped. I’d learned the lesson from other filmmakers of staying in the protagonist’s POV, so why not have the story be essentially visualized by Gunner? As Gunner’s being told the story, we see it as he visualizes it. It worked with the tone and theme of the film, but it was largely built out of not having the money to go off and shoot this big live-action sequence as well.
The graphic novelization in some moments, the iconic imagery in others (specifically the snow falling, in July, through the trees) really do feel like they leap from Gunner’s imagination. Are there any other references you drew on for these moments?
There are many films that I unashamedly borrowed from. I loved the film A Monster Calls, and it brilliantly uses animation to depict some of the fantasy stuff. Or how about the kids riding their bikes with their headlights, that’s completely plagiarized from E.T. Even the moment where Gunner is looking up at the snow was inspired by another favorite movie of mine, The Shawshank Redemption, when Tim Robbins looks up and the rain is falling…so there are all these images that have stuck with me from great, great movies that I borrowed from, I was inspired by, and they were worked their way into the film as well.
Let’s talk about your cast.
Something I learned from great directors who I spoke to as I was about to embark on this journey was this; if it’s your first movie, make sure you are the only novice on the film. Make sure everyone else is far more experienced and far better at their job than you are because they will make you look good as a result. And boy was that true. This is actually my fourth film with Alfred Molina. He found out I was doing this, and he said, ‘Well David, if you need a fat Italian to stand in a doorway, I’m your man.’ [Laughs]. I was like, okay, well I don’t have a fat Italian but I have this quirky character for you, and he came in and just crushed it.
(L-R) Alfred Molina as Jim Bussey and David Oyelowo and Amos Boone in the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
You not only nabbed Alfred for a small role but Maria Bello for the sheriff.
Maria Bello, I met at Sundance Film Festival, she found out I was making a film and said, ‘I want to be in your film.’ I said, I don’t have a role for you in my film, but she said, ‘I want to be in your film.’ So I changed the sheriff from a man to a woman to accommodate the fact that Maria Bello, for goodness sake, wants to be in my movie.
Maria Bello as Sheriff Goodwin in the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
And Rosario Dawson—it’s one of those performances where you can’t really imagine anyone else in the role.
Rosario is just someone I’ve always been a fan of, and I knew that the role required someone who brought so much heart, so much love, so much light in order to be able to really set the stakes for both the son and the father.
(L-R) Lonnie Chavis as Gunner Boone and Rosario Dawson as Mary Boone in the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
Then there are your child actors, who really have to carry the film.
Emotional intelligence is really tough to find with kids. It’s all fine and good having technically proficient kids, but kids who can genuinely portray emotion, can take on themes like loss and self-sacrifice, is hard. I’ve had really good fortune working with young performers in my career. I did a film called Queen of Katwe, it was set in Uganda and we had complete novices because Uganda doesn’t really have a robust film industry. [Director] Mira Nair put the kids through a two-month workshopping process, and to be honest, I learned more from them than they learned from me, because there is a freshness in performance that comes from putting aside all the technical proficiency. This truth just emanated from them, and so I knew if you did the work of trying to find the right kid, then you’d get great performances. In the case of Amiah [Miller], her character has a very troubled history with her father, and in the case of Lonnie [Chavis], a dysfunctional relationship with his father, played by me. These are things that are not overtly stated in their characters, but they carry them as a weight even though they’re going through this adventure. So, they were both needles in a haystack, I was very blessed to find them.
(L-R) A behind the scenes still of director David Oyelowo, Amiah Miller and Lonnie Chavis from the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
There’s a tremendously creepy scene involving bugs—were those real, or was that VFX? I’m praying the latter—I felt like running out of my own apartment.
That emotion you felt is exactly what I wanted you to feel. I remembered feeling that exact thing watching Gremlins when there’s that scene where one of them is put in a blender and turned into gunk. I was like, Ahhh, that’s so gross! I wanted a moment like that in the movie, so the amazing artists at Pixomondo, the visual effects house, put that together. And my whole thing for this movie was that there needs to be this symbiosis—is it snow falling, or is it ash? Are those the howling wild horses we’ve heard about, or just horses escaping a fire? Are those bugs mythical or they just the kind of bugs that inhabit that forest? I wanted this conflation of reality and fantasy, and seeing these things through the eyes of a child. So yes, the bugs were visual effects, but the emotion and the feeling they elicit, that’s what I felt watching those moments as a kid.
The Water Man hits theaters on May 7.
Featured image: David Oyelowo in a behind the scenes still from the adventure/drama film, THE WATER MAN, an RLJE films release. Photo courtesy of Karen Ballard.
We now have our first look at the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, courtesy of HBO. House Targaryen is naturally the focus of House of the Dragon, and the new images reveal a couple of blonde Targaryens and a few other key players, all enjoying (grimly, it appears) some time on the beach. House of the Dragon began production last month, so Game of Thrones fans can officially start the clock on when they’ll get to venture back to Westeros.
While HBO hasn’t also revealed plot information about the show, it is a blast from the recent past to see characters from the world of the juggernaut original series, albeit House of the Dragon is set well before the events of GoT took place, some 300 years before to be exact. House of the Dragon will plunge into the story of the Targaryen clan and reveal how these dragon-lords ended up conquering Westeros. The series comes from co-creators Ryan J. Condal and “A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R. R. Martin, with Game of Thrones alum Miguel Sapochnik as showrunner.
Check out the images, plus character descriptions, all courtesy of HBO.
Steve Toussaint as Lord Corlys Velaryon, “The Sea Snake” Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBOOlivia Cooke as “Alicent Hightower” and Rhys Ifans as “Otto Hightower” Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBOEmma D’Arcy as “Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen” and Matt Smith as “Prince Daemon Targaryen” Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
And here’s the official featured cast list from HBO:
Emma D’Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen: The king’s first-born child, she is of pure Valyrian blood, and she is a dragonrider. Many would say that Rhaenyra was born with everything… but she was not born a man.
Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen: The younger brother to King Viserys and heir to the throne. A peerless warrior and a dragonrider, Daemon possesses the true blood of the dragon. But it is said that whenever a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air…
Steve Toussaint as Lord Corlys Velaryon, “The Sea Snake”: Lord of House Velaryon, a Valyrian bloodline as old as House Targaryen. As “The Sea Snake,” the most famed nautical adventurer in the history of Westeros, Lord Corlys built his house into a powerful seat that is even richer than the Lannisters and that claims the largest navy in the world.
Olivia Cooke as Alicent Hightower: The daughter of Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King, and the most comely woman in the Seven Kingdoms. She was raised in the Red Keep, close to the king and his innermost circle; she possesses both a courtly grace and a keen political acumen.
Rhys Ifans as Otto Hightower: The Hand of the King, Ser Otto loyally and faithfully serves both his king and his realm. As the Hand sees it, the greatest threat to the realm is the king’s brother, Daemon, and his position as heir to the throne.
For more on Game of Thrones spinoffs, check out these stories:
A few days ago Marvel released an epic trailer that reminded all of us why seeing a big movie on a big screen amongst fellow movie lovers is an unbeatable experience. Now, Paramount is returning the favor with this bite-sized teaser for A Quiet Place Part II, with the final trailer coming tomorrow, highlighting one of the films we cannot wait to see in a movie theater. Director John Krasinski’s long-awaited, much-delayed sequel is coming to theaters—and only theaters—on May 28.
Krasinski’s follow-up will have now been delayed well over a year from its original March 20 release date. Like so many other films slated fora. 2020 release, A Quiet Place Part II was delayed several times. Yet before the pandemic had completely ravaged the film release landscape, critics had gotten a chance to see A Quiet Place Part II. They loved it.
What we know about Krasinski’s sequel is that it’ll expand the world introduced in the first film. A Quiet Place was squarely focused on the Abbott family, led by Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt), who were trying to keep their children Marcus and Regan (Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds, respectively) alive—by keeping them quiet. Complicating matters tremendously was the fact that Evelyn was also pregnant. The Abbotts had all the odds stacked against them—yet they survived. Well, not all of them—Lee sacrificed himself to save the children, and Evelyn managed, with a newborn baby no less, to battle back the aliens.
In the sequel, the remaining Abbotts venture out into the larger world, and in doing so come in contact with other survivors (played by Cillian Murphy and Djimon Hounsou, no less), while the monsters are still out there, hunting and killing at the slightest hint of sound.
Check out the teaser below. We’ll share the final trailer when it lands tomorrow.
Featured image: L-r, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) brave the unknown in “A Quiet Place Part II.” Photo credit: Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures.
