#feat. my friend Adam’s character Emmie | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

su-o · 5 years

Link

The tiaras have been dusted off and the pearls polished. Four long years after the final instalment of Downton Abbey, it’s back, this time on the big screen.

This perfect specimen of English baroque is the setting for the new Downton Abbey film – in which George V and Queen Mary tour the north of England (which also includes a visit to Downton itself, filmed as usual at Highclere Castle in Berkshire) – and today they are shooting a grand ball at the home of the Countess of Harewood in the film, attended by the royal couple and Downton’s Crawley family.

In the background, an assistant producer is being told off by one of the volunteers of Wentworth Woodhouse for wandering into a disused room. This isn’t jobsworthiness. The carpet in some rooms is nearly 300 years old and will disintegrate if anyone breathes on it. The wallpaper, meanwhile, is laced with arsenic (as was the fashion at the time) in order to make it a certain shade of green.

Away from the action, Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary (the eldest Crawley daughter), is sitting in her trailer, her sharp features accentuated by period make-up, feeling slightly in awe of the whole process. ‘It was during my costume fitting when it hit me. I got really emotional.’

In America, it became the most successful British drama import of all time. It also set the bar for costume dramas, at least in terms of visual sheen. The Crown, Netflix’s lavish regal series (which returns this autumn), has clearly been influenced by Julian Fellowes’ series, which cost, on average, £1 million per episode to make.

Everyone expected that a film would be made, but it was quite a feat getting the cast together. ‘It was like herding cats,’ says Dockery. ‘But I just love it. It’s so familiar and doesn’t feel like work.’

Despite rumours to the contrary, Maggie Smith is back as the Dowager Countess, famous for her withering put-downs, as are Hugh Bonneville’s paterfamilias the Earl of Grantham, his American wife Cora (played by Elizabeth McGovern) and his two surviving daughters, Lady Mary, of course, and Laura Carmichael’s Lady Edith.

Others involved include Penelope Wilton’s sensible cousin Isobel and many of the downstairs staff: Jim Carter’s stentorian Mr Carson and his wife, the no-nonsense housekeeper Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan); Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol), the plain-speaking cook with Escoffier abilities, and her protégée, the occasionally mutinous Daisy (Sophie McShera).

When I talk to Fellowes though, he is adamant that a film was never inevitable. Rumours circulated about a prequel, following Robert’s courting of Cora for her money and subsequently falling in love with her, but nothing came of it. ‘When we finished the series, we didn’t envisage a film. We had a lovely party at The Ivy and everyone cried, but that was it as far as I was concerned. Then, as the years rolled by, there was a sense that people hadn’t quite finished with it, and eventually I formed an idea for a feature film.’

Other new cast members include Simon Jones and Geraldine James as the King and Queen, Imelda Staunton (real-life wife of Carter) as Lady Bagshaw, lady-in-waiting to the Queen and a relative of the Crawleys, and Tuppence Middleton as her mysterious lady’s maid, Lucy.

Although the film is set 15 years later, the King and Queen did make similar, unlikely tours around the country, as Fellowes explains. ‘After the First World War, there was a period of unsettled feelings about things – not least the monarchy. It had to re-establish itself as many members of European royalty had disappeared – the German Emperor, the Austrian Emperor, the Tsar of Russia. The structure had to be restated as having an integral role in society and they [George and Mary] were very successful in doing so. By 1930, the Crown was back at the heart of English life.’

For Dockery, making the film was not only a chance to catch up with old friends, but also to further develop a character that the nation took to their hearts.

‘Mary is so complex. We met her at 18 and she was this rebellious teenager – she was bored, and because she was a girl, she wasn’t what her father wanted [an heir to Downton]. Ultimately he became very proud of her, though, and I think everyone really responded to that. Seeing her journey was what hooked people.’

Now we see Lady Mary very much in control, happily married (to Matthew Goode’s Henry Talbot) and more than capable of taking over the ancestral pile when the time comes.

‘Julian writes really well for women and I think that has something to do with his wife, Emma [a descendant of Lord Kitchener]. I see a lot of her in Mary, just her expressions and things,’ she says.

Dockery has had a particularly successful career post-Downton. She brought rigour and a dash of fun to her part as an ambitious TV exec in Network (the National Theatre production based on the acclaimed ’70s film), and a sort of watchfulness to the role of a hard-edged widow in Netflix’s warped western Godless. Next year, she will be showing her versatility further in Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, in which she plays the wife of a drug lord (played by Matthew McConaughey).

One character who has a particularly meaty storyline in the film is gay footman Thomas, played by Robert James-Collier. We meet at Shepperton Studios, where the kitchen scenes are being filmed. It’s a cavernous setting which production designer Donal Woods describes as ‘like a noirish, Scandi film, as opposed to the glorious technicolor of upstairs’. For the TV series, the servants’ quarters were created at Ealing Studios, but the set has been flat-packed and sent over, as have the copper jelly moulds, kettles and pans.

This time, we see Thomas befriend a footman from the Royal household (played by Max Brown), and he ends up in an illicit gay drinking den in York. This was an era when homosexuality could result in a prison sentence, but, says James-Collier, for one brief moment his somewhat malevolent character is liberated.

‘He is introduced to this other world that he doesn’t know exists, and there is this sense of relief, this sudden realisation that there are kindred spirits and that he is not this “foul individual” as Mr Carson once described him.’

The irony that Downton Abbey has been sold to countries where homosexuality can be punished by death is not lost on James-Collier, and he feels a grave sense of responsibility about his role. ‘I have received letters from young men who say that watching Thomas’s journey has helped them. All I can say is that it’s an utter privilege. It’s the reason why I do it.’

In the film, however, there are no such concerns, and that reflects the point that Downton is in many ways a fantasy. One criticism of the original scripts was that the Crawleys were too benign as employers, that the relationship between master and servant was much more remote, without any of the Earl of Grantham’s well-meaning paternalism. Fellowes disagrees.

‘This notion that people were horrible to their servants is wrong. Most of us, if you think about it logically, and putting aside the moral view that that life should exist at all, would want to get on with the valet or lady’s maid. When you see a character snarling at his butler, you think this isn’t a way of life. None of us would want to be in a position of speaking to people you disliked.’

If Fellowes is the arbiter of psychological accuracy, then Alastair Bruce is the gatekeeper of protocol. He was Downton’s historical adviser at the beginning and describes himself, among other things, as the posture monitor.

He explains. ‘The cast tend to put their bums here on the seat,’ he says indicating the back of his chair. ‘But in those days, you didn’t – you would sit at the front. Also, [people’s] shoulders have fallen forward because everyone is on their mobile phone all the time.’

Bruce also helps the actors with their diction and mentions the word ‘room’. Many tended to accentuate the ‘o’s when it fact it should be shortened, so they sound very nearly like a ‘u’.

‘It is pompous bollocks, but if you are recreating the ’20s you may as well get it right,’ Bruce adds. ‘Michelle would quite happily let me describe her evolution in life as a long way from Downton Abbey, but I have some pretty grandiose friends who can’t believe this is the case. I am very proud of the fact that she now has this incredible poise – you never see a curve in her back – and her accent is on point.’

Several months later, I ask Fellowes whether he has plans for a sequel (although in truth, certain scenes in the film suggest a full stop rather than a pause). ‘There is never any point in answering that,’ he says. ‘In this business as soon as someone says that’s the last time I’ll put on my ballet shoes, there they are, a year later, dancing Giselle.’

Downton Abbey is released on 13 September

#downton abbey #michelle dockery #rob james collier #Julian Fellowes

37 notes · View notes

in-flagrante · 5 years

Text

The wait is over

THE TIARAS HAVE BEEN DUSTED OFF AND THE PEARLS POLISHED. FOUR LONG YEARS AFTER THE FINAL INSTALMENT OF DOWNTON ABBEY, IT’S BACK, THIS TIME ON THE BIG SCREEN. BEN LAWRENCE WENT ON SET TO UNCOVER SOME FAMILY SECRETS

The Daily Telegraph

31 Aug 2019

As Downton Abbey sweeps majestically on to the big screen, Ben Lawrence joins the cast reunion on set

It is a crisp, clear morning at Wentworth Woodhouse, the stately home in South Yorkshire. Built by the 1st Marquess of Rockingham, it has the widest façade in Europe, boasts at least 365 rooms (no one is certain of the exact number), and represents two and a half acres of building. This perfect specimen of English baroque is the setting for the new Downton Abbey film – in which George V and Queen Mary tour the north of England (which also includes a visit to Downton itself, filmed as usual at Highclere Castle in Berkshire) – and today they are shooting a grand ball at the home of the Countess of Harewood in the film, attended by the royal couple and Downton’s Crawley family.

Inside the house, a production unit zigzags in and out of huge vaulted rooms with cables and film cameras, while extras in 1920s ball attire chat nonchalantly on makeshift chairs. Meanwhile in the ballroom – a giant marble space, adorned with deep-red damask wallpaper and enormous flower arrangements – Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton (two of the stars of the original series) slip through the lines of dancing couples in diaphanous silks, as a small orchestra plays a waltz. In the background, an assistant producer is being told off by one of the volunteers of Wentworth Woodhouse for wandering into a disused room. This isn’t jobsworthiness. The carpet in some rooms is nearly 300 years old and will disintegrate

if anyone breathes on it. The wallpaper, meanwhile, is laced with arsenic (as was the fashion at the time) in order to make it a certain shade of green.

Downton Abbey made Dockery and many of her fellow cast members international names, and no wonder. The ITV series, which ran from 2010 to 2015 and followed the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants, was sold to 220 territories worldwide, achieved a global audience of 120 million and was nominated for 53 International Emmys. In America, it became the most successful British drama import of all time. It also set the bar for costume dramas, at least in terms of visual sheen. The Crown, Netflix’s lavish regal series (which returns this autumn), has clearly been influenced by Julian Fellowes’ series, which cost, on average, £1 million per episode to make.

Despite rumours to the contrary, Maggie Smith is back as the Dowager Countess, famous for her

‘When we finished the series, we didn’t envisage a film. We had a party at The Ivy and everyone cried’

withering put-downs, as are Hugh Bonneville’s paterfamilias the Earl of Grantham, his American wife Cora (played by Elizabeth Mcgovern) and his two surviving daughters, Lady Mary, of course, and Laura Carmichael’s Lady Edith. Others involved include Penelope Wilton’s sensible cousin Isobel and many of the downstairs staff: Jim Carter’s stentorian Mr Carson and his wife, the no-nonsense housekeeper Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan); Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol), the plainspeaking cook with Escoffier abilities, and her protégée, the occasionally mutinous Daisy (Sophie Mcshera).

The Downton Abbey film, directed by Michael Engler, is set in 1927, just over a year after the series ended, and focuses on the Crawleys and their servants as they prepare for a royal visit. It causes much excitement below stairs, but the staff soon find the monarch’s entourage taking over – including a temperamental French chef (played by Philippe Spall) and a pompous head butler, played by David Haig, who refers to himself as the ‘King’s page of the back stairs’. Other new cast members include Simon Jones and Geraldine James as the King and Queen, Imelda Staunton (real-life wife of Carter) as Lady Bagshaw, lady-in-waiting to the Queen and a relative of the Crawleys, and Tuppence Middleton as her mysterious lady’s maid, Lucy.

Fellowes was inspired, in part, by a book he had read called Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey, which details a 1912 visit by King George V and Queen Mary to South Yorkshire. As well as tucking into lavish 13-course dinners, which included puddings served in sugar baskets that took four days to weave, they also met local miners and toured pit villages. Although the film is set 15 years later, the King and Queen did make similar, unlikely tours around the country, as Fellowes explains. ‘After the First World War, there was a period of unsettled feelings about things – not least the monarchy. It had to re-establish itself as many members of European royalty had disappeared – the German Emperor, the Austrian Emperor, the Tsar of Russia. The structure had to be restated as having an integral role in society and they [George and Mary] were very successful in doing so. By 1930, the Crown was back at the heart of English life.’

For Dockery, making the film was not only a chance to catch up with old friends, but also to further develop a character that the nation took to their hearts.

‘Mary is so complex. We met her at 18 and she was this rebellious teenager – she was bored, and

‘It is pompous, but if you are recreating the ’20s you may as well get it right’

because she was a girl, she wasn’t what her father wanted [an heir to Downton]. Ultimately he became very proud of her, though, and I think everyone really responded to that. Seeing her journey was what hooked people.’

Now we see Lady Mary very much in control, happily married (to Matthew Goode’s Henry Talbot) and more than capable of taking over the ancestral pile when the time comes.

Dockery has had a particularly successful career post-downton. She brought rigour and a dash of fun to her part as an ambitious TV exec in Network (the National Theatre production based on the acclaimed ’70s film), and a sort of watchfulness to the role of a hard-edged widow in Netflix’s warped western Godless. Next year, she will be showing her versatility further in Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, in which she plays the wife of a drug lord (played by Matthew Mcconaughey).

One character who has a particularly meaty storyline in the film is gay footman Thomas, played by Robert James-collier. We meet at Shepperton Studios, where the kitchen scenes are being filmed. It’s a cavernous setting which production designer Donal Woods describes as ‘like a noirish, Scandi film, as opposed to the glorious technicolor of upstairs’. For the TV series, the servants’ quarters were created at Ealing Studios, but the set has been flat-packed and sent over, as have the copper jelly moulds, kettles and pans.

This time, we see Thomas befriend a footman from the Royal household (played by Max Brown), and he ends up in an illicit gay drinking den in York. This was an era when homosexuality could result in a prison sentence, but, says James-collier, for one brief moment his somewhat malevolent character is liberated.

The irony that Downton Abbey has been sold to countries where homosexuality can be punished by death is not lost on James-collier, and he feels a grave sense of responsibility about his role. ‘I have received letters from young men who say that watching Thomas’s journey has helped them. All I can say is that it’s an utter privilege. It’s the reason why I do it.’

The film’s 1927 setting marks a period in Britain when country houses such as Downton were beginning to feel the austerity of the interwar years. Death duties had to be paid and households streamlined, which meant that many servants lost their jobs. Meanwhile, the General Strike of 1926 – in which the TUC fought against worsening conditions for the country’s miners – underlined a growing sense of solidarity among the working class. In the film, however, there are no such concerns, and that reflects the point that Downton is in many ways a fantasy. One criticism of the original scripts was that the Crawleys were too benign as employers, that the relationship between master and servant was much more remote, without any of the Earl of Grantham’s well-meaning paternalism. Fellowes disagrees.

Bruce also helps the actors with their diction and mentions the word ‘room’. Many tended to accentuate the ‘o’s when it fact it should be shortened, so they sound very nearly like a ‘u’.

#downton abbey #downton abbey movie #michelle dockery #robert james collier #alastair bruce #julian fellowes

17 notes · View notes

hedwigsaardvark · 5 years

Text

From the Telegraph.

The wait is over: Downton Abbey hits the big screen - and a visit to the set uncovers family secrets

By Ben Lawrence

30 AUGUST 2019

Harry Hadden-Paton, director Michael Engler and Matthew Goode CREDIT: CHARLIE GRAY

CREDIT: CHARLIE GRAY

The tiaras have been dusted off and the pearls polished. Four long years after the final instalment of Downton Abbey, it’s back, this time on the big screen.

Others involved include Penelope Wilton’s sensible cousin Isobel and many of the downstairs staff: Jim Carter’s stentorian Mr Carson and his wife, the no-nonsense housekeeper Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan); Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol), the plain-speaking cook with Escoffierabilities, and her protégée, the occasionally mutinous Daisy (Sophie McShera).

For Dockery, making the film was not only a chance to catch up with old friends, but also to further develop a character that the nation took to their hearts.

Now we see Lady Mary very much in control, happily married (to Matthew Goode’s Henry Talbot) and more than capable of taking over the ancestral pile when the time comes.

Bruce also helps the actors with their diction and mentions the word ‘room’. Many tended to accentuate the ‘o’s when it fact it should be shortened, so they sound very nearly like a ‘u’.

Downton Abbey is released on 13 September

Source and copyright The Telegraph

#the telegraph #matthewgoode #downton abbey

14 notes · View notes

sleemo · 6 years

Text

Edge of Darkness

From the Marines to the Emmys to the most powerful cultural force in the galaxy, for ADAM DRIVER, finding his path has been a long, hard battle. Now, for STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI, in a role he never imagined could be so complex, the brooding face of millennial angst faces his toughest fight yet. Spoiler alert!

—British GQ, December 2017

His face shrouded beneath a hood, Adam Driver strides toward me. Shoulders hunched, fists jammed into jean pockets, he lets out a low whisper, “Hi. I’m Adam.”

The mixed messages – simultaneously worrying he’ll be recognised and that he won’t – hang in the air awkwardly as Driver surveys our spot, a near-empty New York City café. Neither fear is well-founded; there is no flock of fans to notice him and yet there is no mistaking the actor, his grey hoodie notwithstanding.

“I try to disguise things, but it just doesn’t really work for me,” Driver says, shedding the sweatshirt. “I honestly just look the way I look and it’s difficult to blend in because I’m tall and I look strange. I shouldn’t put a judgment on it.”

Others have judged his appearance more favourably. Driver has been dubbed a “cure for the cookie-cutter leading man” and “a millennial sex symbol”. Which may or may not be a compliment. Although few phrases are as loaded as “unconventionally attractive”, it’s as if those two words were combined expressly to describe Driver. Exaggerated ears; hooded, slanted eyes; long nose with a boxer’s bridge; broad mouth and lips – his disparate features coalesce into a surprisingly appealing whole.

“I guess I never think about it like ‘I am a leading man’ or ‘I am a sex symbol.’ It’s strange to hear that stuff. I don’t think I could have imagined it,” says Driver. Yet, there was his visage on Gap billboard ads; in American Vogue with a black-horned ram slung across his shoulders; in a close-up at the Emmy Awards, where he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor three years in a row for his part in HBO’s Girls; and cast eternally in plastic as a Kylo Ren action figure for Star Wars: The Force Awakens – masked and unmasked versions available. (“Not bad,” he says of the likeness, “but my head and face are a lot bigger.”) Passers-by who once stopped him to ask, “How could you do that to Hannah?” in reference to the bad-boy behaviour of Driver’s character in Lena Dunham’s runaway-success television series, now ask, “How could you do that to Han Solo?”

“It’s a lot,” Driver says, “every part of my life. If we rewound to ten years ago, I would not have said that this is what my life would be.

“And now this music,” he waves his hands at the piano composition streaming through the café like pretentious Musack, “is making that sound so emotional. It isn’t helping, you know?”

Far from angry, the brooding face of millennial angst is smirking. At 33, Adam Driver’s signature intensity hasn’t wavered, but interest in being a tortured artist has. He’s aware of his tendencies – toward anxiety, analysis and absolutism – and is taking steps to temper them. Still, it’s a struggle, seeing good fortune as anything but a cause for self-flagellation.

If we did rewind ten years, we’d see why. Driver was a Gordian knot of clenched intensity. Enrolled at New York’s Juilliard performing arts school, he was so aggressive that his comments made fellow students cry. Every morning he would have six eggs for breakfast, then run five miles to the school from his home in Queens. He would eat a whole chicken for lunch and, during his day at the prestigious drama school, perform random feats, such as 1,000 push-ups.

“That must’ve been an obnoxious thing to be around,” he says, shaking his head. “I was trying to make it as extreme for myself as possible. Now it just makes me so tired and annoyed.”

I’ve met Driver in a peaceful, leafy corner of the Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood that he and his wife, Joanne Tucker, call home. It’s a square precinct full of baby strollers that belies the borough’s hipster cred. “I like sleepy, quiet places,” Driver explains, “because my job is very loud.” Right now he’s savouring a respite from work, the first in a five-year sprint to stardom and even letting himself idle a little. Driver, who has made a career of ill-at-ease eccentricity, is starting to feel comfortable in his own skin.

He genuinely enjoyed himself on the set of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which will be released in cinemas this December. “The first one was all ‘You can’t fuck it up,’ you know? There was a lot more hanging out this time,” Driver says. “Then there are just practical things, like I have a lightsaber. That’s fun.”

Whatever the outcome of the larger battle between good and evil, the Resistance and the First Order, never underestimate the power of Driver’s light side. ”I had heard about Adam’s intensity before I worked with him, but he’s also really fun and funny,” says Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi’s director.

There was one emotionally charged scene that they shot over and over. “Every time the guy holding the clapper marked each take, Adam just starts trying to steal his shoe,” Johnson recalls. “It was hilarious. And then Adam goes straight into it with all the intensity of Kylo Ren. He just added a sense of play that made the process really click.”

Neither Johnson nor Driver can say what the scene was about or who else was in it. They are acutely aware of the cone of silence that surrounds the Star Wars films, suitably enough, like a force field. “There’s probably something in my contract, I don’t know – but it’s kind of unbelievable that no one has told me, ‘Don’t say anything,’” Driver explains. “It’s just implicitly understood.”

With plot points guarded like state secrets, even the tiniest perceived leak sets off an online feeding frenzy. Internet scribes grab at every quote, often misreading them. “You have to clarify truthful things you’ve said that people read these false things into,” Driver says. “It can be frustrating.”

After several years of sidestepping spoilers, Driver is practised at the art of obfuscation. His evasive manoeuvres are near perfect.

On whether he enjoyed acting opposite Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey: “That’s hard to answer. I mean, people assume that we’d spend time with each other. Maybe our characters see each other in the movie?”

On whether he had scenes with Carrie Fisher: “It’s hard to answer without being vague.”

On whether the lightsaber scar on his face, which came courtesy of Rey in The Force Awakens, was moved for the new film: “I noticed a lot of things.”

On whether Kylo Ren’s story has a happy ending: “Not saying yes or no. But continue.”

On whether Han Solo might have known Kylo Ren would kill him: “That’s interesting.”

On whether he appears with his mask off: “Yes, I can answer that. You’ll see it off in the new trailer, so I’m not giving anything away!”

Other times, Driver playfully embraces the absurdity of it all. “I can’t say anything, but what if I signal you,” he jokes. “If I just start sneezing uncontrollably…” He fakes a loud achoo and exclaims, “Bingo! Harrison Ford’s ghost returns!”

When I ask him about Kylo Ren’s mysterious order of Dark Side disciples, the Knights of Ren, he waxes whimsical. “We can talk about them. Peter, Paul, John… No, I was thinking of The Beatles. Except wait – there’s Peter. He was too ambitious on the tambourine. Now you know: the last Knight of Ren is Ringo Starr!”

On this particular mid-September day, the internet is abuzz with new speculation that Ridley’s character, Rey, is the daughter of Princess Leia (also Kylo Ren’s mother). This theory would take any romantic tension between her and Driver’s Kylo Ren into the realm of incest – territory that the first Star Wars trilogy explored with a kiss between Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher’s Leia.

“Yeah, my uncle and my mum made out,” Driver says, with a laugh. “Which Mark still talks about. He’s like, ‘Luke kissed his sister. How could he do that?’ I guess he hasn’t seen Game Of Thrones, you know?”

The Last Jedi marks the final film in Fisher’s storied career. Like the rest of the cast, Driver was shaken by the actress’ death last December at age 60. “It’s hard to talk about it without saying generic things,” he says. “Like, ‘It’s shocking,’ but it was. Or ‘It’s incredibly sad,’ which it is. I mean, it is all of those things.”

Driver brightens as he recalls Fisher’s wit on display at Comic-Con before the release of The Force Awakens. “The whole cast was downstairs in a conference room, talking through what’s supposed to happen at this big event. She was like, ‘Just pretend you’re down to earth. People love that shit.’” Driver pauses for a moment then laughs. “So now I pretend I’m down to earth and you know what? People really do love that shit. They eat it up.”

The image of Driver that people have consumed is not so much down to earth as intense and uncompromising, the all-or-nothing avatar of millennial manhood named Adam Sackler, Driver’s character in Girls. Ever since Driver landed the part, originally a cameo called simply “Handsome Carpenter”, the notion he really was that id-driven artist has, like the life of another charismatic carpenter, been taken as gospel.

In the public consciousness, Driver’s backstory is as extreme as his alter ego’s: a Midwestern misfit enlists in the Marines after 9/11, then studies acting at Juilliard – and finds he’s an outlier in both worlds. The truth is both less and more dramatic.

Born in San Diego, California, Driver is the son of a preacher. When his parents divorced, Driver moved with his mother back to her native Mishawaka, Indiana, where she was soon remarried to a Baptist minister. As a teenager, Driver was a poor student who dabbled in pyromania, trainspotting and climbing radio towers. A fan of the film Fight Club, Driver started one with some friends. “Just seeing the angst, I thought it would be a good idea to emulate it.“

Acting offered Driver a way out of the tiny town he called a shithole. “I applied to Juilliard when I was graduating high school and didn’t get in, so I was like ‘Well, fuck it. I won’t go to college, then.’” Instead, he set off for Hollywood and what he thought would be overnight stardom. “I’d always heard the stories of people striking out and finding success,” he says. “Why not me?” The dream lasted as long as his hand-me-down 1990 Lincoln Town Car did. After it broke down outside Amarillo, Texas, the repairs cost Driver nearly all the money he’d saved. When he finally limped into Los Angeles, Driver spent two nights in youth hostels. The only agent he signed with was a real estate agency, which took him for the rest of his savings. Having landed neither an apartment nor an acting gig, Driver arrived back in Indiana a week after leaving.

Following the 11 September attacks, Driver did not, as some retellings suggest, march down to the recruiting station. Instead, he enlisted in the Marines several months later. “My stepfather pushed me into it a little bit, which was good – I was grateful for it,” Driver says. “It followed an argument where he was like, ‘You’re not doing anything!’ I’d gotten this brochure in the mail. He was like, ‘Why don’t you just join?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to join the Marines.’ Then I thought about it more. I had this sense of patriotism and wanted to get involved. I also had no prospects. I was living in the back of my parents’ house, working as a telemarketer.”

From the start, Driver’s time in uniform had a profound effect on him and his worldview. “The patriotism, the idea of country, doesn’t go away necessarily, it just turns into something else,” he says, reverently. “Not a big, sweeping idea, but this group of people you’re serving with, and that becomes your world, and it becomes sacred.”

Going into the Marines, Driver had a seemingly straightforward goal: “I’m going to be a man.” But rather than reinforce clichéd concepts of masculinity, military service put the lie to them. “You have to put implicit trust in the people to your left and right, and when they demonstrate that they’re looking out for you, that their own safety is secondary to yours, then all that kind of guy shit goes away and there is no ego,” Driver says. “There is no posturing, no need to say how much of a man you are, whatever that even means. You prove it with your actions.”

When Driver was not allowed to deploy to the Middle East with his unit, after suffering a broken sternum in a mountain biking accident, he was despondent. Although he fought to stay on active duty, Driver ultimately received a medical discharge.

He decided to apply to Juilliard again and this time got in. The transition from the Marine Corps to a New York City drama programme was jarring. During Driver’s second year, in an effort to bridge his past and present vocations, he launched a non-profit called Arts In The Armed Forces with his then-girlfriend, now wife, Tucker. Driver was able to carry a discipline and teamwork into his studies, but it didn’t stop him from feeling he’d gone soft. “I was like, ‘What am I doing? I’m wearing pyjamas doing acting exercises where I’m giving birth to myself or being a plant or moving around in jelly,’” he says. “Then again, even now, I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’”

After a brief fallow period after graduating from Juilliard, Driver says he learned to hate everyone in the audition room. He didn’t like TV and almost skipped his audition for Girls entirely. Instead, he dazzled the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, and the one-episode part Driver had read for was expanded into a central one. In audition after audition, Driver made a similar impression on a series of noted directors. Even before Girls aired, Steven Spielberg cast him in Lincoln, in which he played a telegraph operator opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. “He was very nice to me,” Driver says of the legendary method actor. “He would still talk in character, but very nice.”

In particular, Driver’s unusual, instinctive style made him a favourite of indie filmmakers. He landed meaty roles in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and a series of films by writer-director Noah Baumbach: Frances Ha, While We’re Young and The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected). He played the lead in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and shared top billing in Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky. When Martin Scorsese was finally able to make his passion project, Silence, after two decades, he sought out Driver. Similarly, Driver recently wrapped shooting on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which Terry Gilliam had been trying to make for 17 years.

And yet nothing Driver had done remotely prepared him for Star Wars. He had grown up a fan of the original trilogy, but had little faith in outsized film franchises. “I’m leery of big movies – a lot of them sacrifice character for spectacle,” he says. “When they’re bad, it pisses me off – you can just tell it’s made by a bunch of executives somewhere.”

Despite his initial trepidation, the complicated nature of Kylo Ren put Driver’s concerns to rest. “It was all about story and character and playing someone who doesn’t have it all together. Making him as human as possible seemed dangerous and exciting to me.”

Driver was drawn to an idea that JJ Abrams, who wrote and directed The Force Awakens, had. The man behind the mask was not a man at all, but rather a young person struggling to come of age. “I remember the initial conversations about having things ‘skinned’,” Driver recalls, “peeling away layers to evolve into other people, and the person Kylo’s pretending to be on the outside is not who he is. He’s a vulnerable kid who doesn’t know where to put his energy, but when he puts his mask on, suddenly, he’s playing a role. JJ had that idea initially and I think Rian took it to the next level.”

Driver is on a roll now, discussing what excites him: character and narrative and cinematic influences. The original Star Wars was an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress, he says, and the link lives on in the new trilogy, in which concealed identities drive the narrative. Then he lets it slip. “You have, also, the hidden identity of this princess who’s hiding who she really is so she can survive and Kylo Ren and her hiding behind these artifices,” Driver says, apparently dropping a massive revelation about Rey’s royal origins.

Perhaps he’s unconcerned and Rey’s parentage is less dramatic than imagined by fans, who posited that her father is Luke then trumpeted that her mother is Leia. Or it could be that, in passionately holding forth, Driver is simply unaware he’s revealed anything, much less a major spoiler. In any case, he doesn’t skip a beat. “The things that made it personal to me,” Driver continues, “I’ll keep to myself, but I think everybody can relate to the idea of almost being betrayed.

“Wow, this music is killing me.”

As the café’s latest piano piece reaches its crescendo, I ask Driver if he tapped into his own experiences with his dad and stepfather and he reverts to evasive manoeuvres.

“I may leave that one. I have strong convictions about not talking about family, for many reasons,” Driver says. “It’s not as if the answers for Kylo are found in my relationships with my parents.”

In The Last Jedi, director Rian Johnson saw Driver go light years beyond his own experience. “Adam was always pushing the context of the character,” Johnson says. “He’s put in this unhealthy environment and goes through the worst of youth, the selfishness and volatility, he’s representing that side of adolescence.”

Of course, these days immaturity and insecurity are no strangers to power. “It makes complete sense how juvenile he can be,” Driver says of Ren, who prefers lightsabers over Twitter for his tantrums. “You can see that with our leadership and politics. You have world leaders who you imagine – or hope or pray – are living by kind of a higher code of ethics. But it really all comes down to them feeling wronged or unloved or wanting validation.”

Even more topical and even more touchy was the decision to play Kylo Ren like a radicalised extremist. “We talked about terrorism a lot,” Driver says of his early conversations with Abrams and Johnson about his character. “You have young and deeply committed people with one-sided education who think in absolutes. That is more dangerous than being evil. Kylo thinks what he is doing is entirely right, and that, in my mind, is the scariest part.”

The demagoguery drives him to the most famous film patricide in galactic history, as Kylo Ren kills Han Solo in the shocking denouement of The Force Awakens. “When I watched the premiere, I felt sick to my stomach,” Driver recalls. “The people behind me, when the scroll started, were like ‘Oh my god. Oh my god. It’s happening.’ Immediately, I thought I was going to puke. I was holding my wife’s hand, and she’s like, ‘You’re really cold. Are you OK?’ Because I just knew what was coming – I kill Harrison – and I didn’t know how this audience of 2,000 people was going to respond to it, you know?”

One person in the crowd who appreciated that scene was Han Solo himself. “We were sitting on this catwalk in between takes,” Driver recalls, “and Harrison was like, ‘Look what we get to do. Just look what we get to do.’ Meaning, look at how lucky we are that this is our job, you know? To see someone at that point in his career still get excited like that hit me. It’s like, ‘Oh, right. I need to take this in more.’”

As if on cue, a couple stop and introduce themselves. “I love everything you’ve ever done,” the wife says. “Everything.”

“Thanks a million. Yeah. Hi, I’m Adam.”

As fan encounters go, it is respectful and pleasant, but not even a whimper of what will soon follow come the release of The Last Jedi.

For all the ways in which he’s made peace with his success, Driver, who is almost pathologically private by nature, remains uncomfortable with notoriety. “I’m not in the world the same way I was before,” Driver says. “It’s completely changed my life. My anonymity is gone. But who I am as a person is the exact same. I think. Or, I hope.”

Soon after, we exit the café, as Driver is heading home for some quiet time. He stops in front of a bicycle locked to a fence. “It only looks bourgeois-hipster because of the saddle,” Driver says, adding that he’s only just added the leather Brooks seat. “I bought the bike for $200 back when I was at Juilliard,” Driver says. “Besides the seat, it’s the same crappy bike I’ve had for forever.”

Driver pulls his hoodie up over his head and as he starts pedalling off turns back to me. “Remember,” he says. “Pretend you’re down to earth. People love that shit. Right?”

The Last Jedi is out on 15 December.

#this is the ENTIRE THING #gah its so long #this took forever #adam driver #interview #gq #kylo ren #ben solo #star wars #the last jedi #the force awakens #long post

412 notes · View notes

newyorktheater · 5 years

Text

What is a play – and what is its purpose? These questions come to mind after reading the 15 plays commissioned by T the New York Times Style Magazine in America 2024, a multimedia anthology of scripts an videotaped performances in answer to the question: What will the U.S. be like in five years? The plays come from some of the leading playwrights of the nation, including Jackie Sibblies Drury, who yesterday won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, “Fairview.”

Her play for T is entitled “Various Pre-Apocalyptic Post-Coital Scenes” The script is accompanied by a video of a staged reading of the play by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Roslyn Ruff and Hannah Cabell.

Her T play, and those by Adam Rapp and Celine Song will be read at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next Monday, April 22nd, followed by a discussion with the three playwrights. This thus avoids one of the questions that T inspired: Is something a play that’s intended only to be read?

Terrence McNally contributed “Muses of Fire,” his conversation in the clouds during the 2024 Presidential inauguration with six dead great American playwrights (“Life is wasted on the living,” the imagined Thornton Wilder says.) They are portrayed in a video accompanying the script by six well-regarded actors — Eugene O’Neill (Nathan Lane), Thornton Wilder (David Hyde Pierce), Lorraine Hansberry (Kerry Washington), Tennessee Williams (Richard Thomas), Arthur Miller (John Lithgow) and Edward Albee (Frederick Weller.) (McNally portrayed himself.)

“Theater stopped telling the truth when it started charging for admission. After the Greeks, it was selling something. Everybody was a salesman,” Edward Albee says in McNally’s play. “You got that part right, Artie.”

Ironically, the photographs of the playwrights and actors are captioned with descriptions of the clothes they’re wearing and how much they cost — one of the two aspects of this otherwise extraordinary project that go beyond odd (to annoying?) The other is the introduction by Hanya Yanagihara offering a definition of literature that leaves out a lot of really good theater. “…there is a crucial difference between journalism and literature: If the former concerns itself with What is, the latter is interested in What if. That instinct — the artistic compulsion to stretch the possibilities of the moment to their most outlandish, terrifying extremes — can often illuminate the current era. Literature, be it in the form of a play or poem or novel, is often at its most captivating when it is at its most exaggerated, when it articulates our collective fears or concerns.”

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

I might go a great distance to watch Ben Whishaw strip off his suit and turn into Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe before our eyes. But I only had to travel to 30thStreet and 10thAvenue, in between the High Line and Hudson Yards, to the Griffin Theater on the sixth floor of The Shed, a new $500 million performing arts center .

As it turns out, though, it was the creative team that went far — too far. “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which is half sung and half spoken by both Whishaw and Renee Fleming, combines the myth of Helen of Troy with the story of Marilyn Monroe (birth name: Norma Jeane.) This inaugural piece at the Griffin reflects the mission of The Shed, as articulated by its artistic director Alex Poots, to commission original works that “take creative risks and push artistic boundaries.” The show, with a starry cast and impeccable avant-garde credentials, is an intriguing and erudite experiment on multiple levels. On too many of those levels, however, it just didn’t work for me.

Oklahoma

I’m grateful for having first seen Daniel Fish’s dark, hip and homey production of “Oklahoma!” at St. Ann’s Warehouse last year, because I can see how much improved it is now that it has transferred to Broadway. They kept what I liked about it, and got rid of much of what I found most annoying.

The Week in Theater Awards

Playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury –

Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury Wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Congratulations to @jackiesdrury for winning the #PulitzerPrize for her stunning play Fairview! And thank you to the @PulitzerPrizes for naming me a finalist along with the brilliant Clare Barron, who also grew up in my hometown of Wenatchee, WA (pop. 34,000)!

— Heidi Schreck (@heidibschreck) April 15, 2019

Ann Reinking & Ben Vereen will serve as hosts to the Chita Rivera Awards on May 19 at the NYU Skirball Center

New York Theater Awards 2019 – Guide and Calendar

The Week in New York Theater News

Terrence McNally

Paula Vogel

Chay Yew

MJ Kaufman

Pride Plays at Rattlestick Theater, co-produced by actor Michael Urie, will feature staged readings to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, June 20 – June 24. Plays included (so far): Blueprints to Freedom by Michael Benjamin Washington; Last Summer at Bluefish Cove by Jane Chambers; Some Men by Terrence McNally; On this Morning by Caroline Prugh; As Is by William Hoffman; Eat and You Belong to Us by MJ Kaufman; Room Enough by Daaimah Mubashshir; Nora Highland by Ryan Spahn;Le Switch by Philip Dawkins; Mariquitas by Eduardo Machado; Bike Race by Eri Nox; The Last Sunday in June by Jonathan Tolins; The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel; A Language of Their Own by Chay Yew

.@TinaBroadway, starring @AdrienneWarren, will open at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on November 7, 2019, shortly before the 80th birthday of the dynamo entertainer Tina Turner born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennesseehttps://t.co/sdL09HUqOO

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) April 11, 2019

Laurie Metcalf,

Eddie Izzard

Russell Tovey

Patsy Ferran

Laurie Metcalf and Eddie Izzard will star in the fifth Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, opening April 9, 2020. Russell Tovey and Patsy Ferran will co-star.

Signature Theater 2019-2020 Season:

Fires in the Mirror By Anna Deavere Smith Directed by SaheemAli October 22 – November 24, 2019 A revival of Smith’s extraordinary documentary mosaic of the people involved in the Crown Heights riots in the summer of 1991 in the aftermath of the deaths of an African-American boy and a young Orthodox Jewish scholar.

The Young Man from Atlanta By Horton Foote Directed by Michael Wilson November 5 – December 8, 2019 A revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of an aging couple still reeling from the death of their only child, whose friend visits them with the truth they don’t want to acknowledge.

Cambodian Rock Band**A New York Premiere** By Lauren Yee Directed by ChayYew February 4 – March 8, 2020 The story of a Khmer Rouge survivor returning back to Cambodia for the first time in thirty years as his daughter prepares to help prosecute one of Cambodia’s most infamous war criminals. It is infused with a live band playing contemporary Dengue Fever hits and classic Cambodian oldies

The Hot Wing King By Katori Hall Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III February 11 – March 15, 2020 Ready, set, fry! It’s time for the annual Hot Wang Festival in Memphis, Tennessee, and Cordell Crutchfield knows he has the wings that’ll make him king.When Dwayne takes in his troubled nephew however, it becomes a recipe for disaster

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 By Anna Deavere Smith Directed by TaibiMagar April 28 – May 31, 2020 The Smith treatment of the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King police brutality verdict.

Confederates By DominiqueMorisseau Directed by Kamilah Forbes May 12 – June 14, 2020 Sarah, a savvy slave turned Union spy, and Sandra, a brilliant professor in a modern-day private university, are facing similar struggles, even though they live over a century apart.

92Y’s Reel Pieces series will present a conversation with Tony and Oscar winner Glenda Jackson April 29 at 7:30 PM.”

Jayne Houdyshell with a canine at Broadway Barks

The 21st annual Broadway Barks, the pet adoption event co-founded by Tony winner Bernadette Peters and the late Emmy winner Mary Tyler Moore, will be held July 13.

Billy Crystal is working with composer Jason Brown and lyricist Amanda Green on a musical version of his film Mr. Saturday Night, according to Variety. The 1992 film focused on Buddy Young Jr., the self-destructive, washed-up (or never-was) comedian estranged from his family, which began as a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Crystal age from his 20s to his 70s in the film. “It’s a great character and now I don’t need the makeup!” said Crystal, who turned 70 in March.

Oh, and we’ve BEEN rehearsing…#InTheHeightsMovie pic.twitter.com/ogA0QzWdKs

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) April 11, 2019

How adult actors pull off playing children onstage

The bigger challenge is pulling off realism, creating the illusion that the adults onstage are plausible as the much-younger characters — a feat accomplished by two of Broadway’s biggest hits, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “Mockingbird” features Celia Keenan-Bolger, 41, as Scout; Will Pullen, 28, as Jem; and Gideon Glick, 30, as Dill. Potter has a new cast that took over March 20, with Nicholas Podany, 22, as Albus Potter; Bubba Weiler, 25, as Scorpius Malfoy; and Nadia Brown, 24, as Rose Granger-Weasley — all ages 11 to about 15 during the course of the two-part play. (The original Rose was played by Susan Heyward, 36.)

The distance between an audience and actors in a theater helps. Podany also doesn’t want to “play a kid,” saying instead he tries to “stop being an adult.” “It’s a small shift in semantics but a big shift in my mind-set,” he said. Kids experience everything so vividly while adults “make a choice not to feel things so intensely.”

Rest in Peace

I’m shocked and saddened by the death of Broadway veteran Eric LaJuan Summers, at age 36, from cancer. In 2013, when he had six roles in @MotownMusical , I called him the best male dancer on Broadway.https://t.co/bT6Pn7GRub

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) April 10, 2019

RIP Georgia Engel, 70, best known for portraying sweet Georgette on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. She began her career on the stage (she was in the original Broadway production of Hello Dolly), and returned Off-Broadway (in @AnnieNBaker‘s John) pic.twitter.com/Khd85nSIce

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) April 16, 2019

Engel obituary

Alan Wasser, a veteran Broadway general manager, dies at age 70

A memorial for late actor and director Alvin Epstein, who made his mark as a premiere interpreter of Samuel Beckett’s plays, will be held at the Irish Repertory Theatre on April 29 at 3 PM

Pulitzer Honors Fairview. Pride Plays. Plays on Paper. Tina on Broadway. #Stageworthy News of the Week What is a play – and what is its purpose? These questions come to mind after reading the 15 plays commissioned by T the New York Times Style Magazine in…

0 notes