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ebiemidnightlibrarian · 7 months

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Oh, it's already that time of the year.

Hello, there!

Yeah, it's been a while since I posted something, but the thing is, I was just crawling out of the shitty pit I'm in when very suddenly my father fell seriously ill. Now I'm once again spiralling into my anxious pit.

But I'm a bit cheered up by the spooky season (even tho we don't have those around here). So, I decided to share some playlists, (a couple of creepy characters playlists and MORE), I've collected over the years and I hope they make your spooky season a bit more spooky.

Well, let's get started!

♱

First of all, we have the playlist I made for my darling Jerry Dandridge, I shared it a while ago, but tbh it's one of my all-time favourites. It has the vibes of the film and fits the vibes of the character, I just love it.

I'm still mad that Spotify doesn't have the Fright Night music theme by 'the J. geils band' nor the INCREDIBLE theme 'come to me' (both the singing and instrumental version) by brad fiedel. So if I had to say something is missing in this one, I would say these three songs.

Now, this man has taken over my life for almost THREE WHOLE YEARS, and I gotta thank Mike Flanagan for this. I know you already know of whom I'm talking about. Our beloved poor lil meow meow and vampire priest Father Paul.

He lives in my head rent-free ever since he screamed “HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL?!” into Riley's face. I honestly think I could fix him, or at least fuck him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The next is a trash can of a man and has made me question my sanity and my moral compass, and I think that's full Hamish acting skills fault. Well, our favourite unhinged wolf man, John Tyler.

You know, I had two stalkers during my school years, and I think that definitely affected me, anyway I like to believe it's the look of those puppy eyes that had me.

Talking about stalking psychopaths, I think I have a historic, bc David Dastmachian's performance as MacGyver nemesis on the remake of the series changed me on a molecular level. That's right, I'm talking about everybody's favourite hitman, Murdoc!

Yeah, that leather trench coat and black high neck has me on my knees. Also, unironically, mama bear Murdoc it's actually very sexy.

Now my dearest, we get to the new stuff, this I haven't posted yet for some unknown reason, but it's time to let them see the moonlight!

Ngl, Lily Rabe has so may Iconic roles on AHS that I HAD to make her something. So, to my AHS lovers, we have a playlist full of eerie and sacrilegious songs to our favourite possessed nun!

Nobody can convince me that AHS: Asylum isn't the best season from the series, honestly, I always re-watch during the spooky season and always slays.

I'm a fan of themed/pov playlists, I find them very immersive, so I'm always doing them when I have the chance, so, in one of these opportunities, I did a 80s slasher pov playlist, that has such a cool vibe! I hope you guys feel the same!

This one is dedicated to the nostalgia boost that the 80s slashers are to me.

And for the last, but not leat, my Ultimate Halloween Playlist™, it has some of my favourite songs from each one of those playlists, and I'm always adding more. Which are your ultimate spooky season playlist? I'll love to know!

Well, I think that's all for now, have fun everyone and be safe!! Lots of love!!

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disarmluna · 16 days

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#lily rabe #fashion #style #fashion trust awards #john galliano

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dancingisdangerouss · 2 years

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All right all right, here we go, we’re starting on Tell Me Your Secrets. This is a good start, I already get to use this fucking image again:

To clear up space, once I’m done being annoying with the commentary I’ll delete the previous reblogs

#tell me your secrets #Amazon prime #penny for your thots #hamish linklater #John Tyler #lily rabe #Emma hall

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deliver-me-father-paul · 2 years

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This is what I mean when I invoke "the female gaze".

#tell me your secrets #hamish linklater #lily rabe #the female gaze #i cannot believe i - your favorite local bisexual - is saying this but #let the woman keep her clothes on #feminism #feminism first #my thing with tall compact men though #john is creepy #but #*gesticulates wildly at photo*

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sempersev · 11 months

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Dream ft. Pamela & the store

I was outside somewhere and Pamela showed up. We got in a pick-up truck. I was in the passenger seat, she was driving and my friend was in the back seat. We were going to Wal-Mart and she took these back roads I didn't know. I told her "My dad will freak out, pardon the pun, if you scratch his truck." She didn't look at me, but she smirked with a look that said "I see what you did there" as well as "Oh, so you know who I am."

When we got there, we got out and walked through a heavy door and down a dim hall. It was the back way in to the store that she knew about. When we were inside, we all walked around together until I looked away and lost them. So there's me looking all over trying to find Pamela. I finally thought to call my friend. She answered and I asked where she was. She said right there. I looked and she was a few feet away. I went over and asked where Pamela was but she didn't know.

We walked towards the back of the store, where we'd come in, and looked for her. Then she showed up and we all made our way to the bathroom. I was talking to Pamela as my friend went ahead and I said, "I don't think she even knows who you are" and she laughed in agreement.

We went into the bathroom and Pamela was looking at the shoes people had trying to find which stall my friend was in. She saw blue shoes and reached underthe stall and took them (shoes off in the stalls). She peeked over the door and was laughing but then looked serious cos it wasn't my friend! This older woman (Betty White looking) came out and Pamela was apologizing like crazy.the woman said it was fine and she was a fan. She kissed Pamela on the right, then left cheek.

Pamela left and came back in dressed as a nun. I asked what she was wearing and she said she liked it. She went into a stall. I sat at a small table playing with 6 tiny dice and levitating the table with my feet. There were guys in there (totally normal) and one was telling me to turn to hisradio station. 104.3fm. I couldn't find it at first but the antenna helped. Puddles of water were in front of stalls. I had to pee for real and wanted to before we continued shopping.

I could see Pamela had on white tights and was gonna say I liked them later on. She was in there for 20 minutes undressing, then she flew up into the ceiling and vanished. I told the guy I couldn't believe she left like that. He looked and she was gone.

I went back into the store, had to go under a phone cord that Elton John was using. He tried to lift it as I walked over it. It unplugged so I fixed it. I looked for Pamela in the store but had no luck. I looked at a shelf of books for sale and some photographer guy with a camera was there and I dropped a book. He picked it up and we had an argument. His wife was there and this whole part was pointless, but then we mentioned Elton being there. I never did find Pamela again!

#pamela rabe #elton john #dreams #joan ferguson

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supercalifragipopculturevomit · 7 months

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Pick Your Favorite Sad Boi, Daniel Brühl Edition:

Nikolas Koll, Der Pakt - Wenn Kinder Töten (1996)

Checo, Paradise Mall / Schlaraffenland (1999)

Markus Baasweiler, Schule (2000)

Marek, Honolulu (2001)

Daniel, No Regrets / Nichts Bereuen (2001)

Marko Stemper, Elephant Heart / Elefantenherz (2002)

Arbo, Vaya Con Dios (2002)

Alexander Kerner, Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)

Paul Krantz, Love in Thoughts / Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken (2004)

Jan, The Edukators / Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (2004)

Andrea Marowski, Ladies in Lavender (2004)

Karl, A Friend of Mine (2006)

Tonda, Krabat (2008)

Dirk, All Together (2011)

Dr. Georg Rosen, John Rabe (2009)

Hans Krämer, The Coming Days / Die kommenden Tage (2010)

Álex Garel, Eva (2011)

Niki Lauda, Rush (2013)

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, The Fifth Estate (2013)

Thomas Lang, The Face of an Angel (2014)

Daniel, Colonia (2015)

Sebastian Zöllner, Me and Kaminski (2015)

Tony Balerdi, Burnt (2015)

Escherich, Alone in Berlin (2016)

Helmut Zemo, Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, The Alienist (2018 - 2020)

Ernst Schmidt, The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

Thomas Fischer, My Zoe (2019)

Daniel Weltz, Next Door / Nebenan (2021)

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demeters-fangs · 6 months

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hamish linklater needs to return to mike flanagan’s cinematic universe. i wonder what character he would play next?

would he continue on as another vampire or monster of some kind? side character? another lead role?

#hamish linklater #midnight mass #father paul #father paul hill #hamishlinklater #mike flanagan #monsignor john pruitt #monsignor pruitt #the new adventures of old christine #haunting of hill house #haunting of bly manor #the fall of the house of usher #doctor sleep #matthew kimble #john tyler #tell me your secrets #lily rabe hamish linklater #lily rabe #i’m famished for hamish

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ellewoodzzzisaicon · 4 months

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Shut the hell up... Early Christmas present?!

#there so cute #hamish linklater #midnight mass #john pruitt #monsignor pruitt #clark debussy #midnight mass netflix #mike flanagan #lily rabe

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majorhortonisonleaveinlondon · 1 month

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An updated (April 3, 2024 7:48am pst) list of WW2 movies and TV shows in chronological order

thought out WW2 -(Imitation Game 2014) -(The Book Thief 2013) -(The Zookeeper’s Wife 2017) -(The Pianist 2002)

1937

October 26, 1937 Defence of Sihang Warehouse (The Eight Hundred 2020)

December 13, 1937 Nanjing Massacre - (John Rabe 2009) - (The Flowers of War 2011)

1938

Fall of 1938 (Munich – The Edge of War 2022)

1939

Summer 1939 (Six Minutes to Midnight 2020)

September 3, 1939 King George VI first wartime speech (King’s Speech 2010)

September 17, 1939, Soviet Union Invitation of Poland (The Way Back 2010)

November 30, 1939 Soviet Union invades Finland (The Winter War 1989)

1940

April 9, 1940 Operation Weserübung -(April 9th [movie] 2015) -(King’s Choice 2016) -(Narvik 2022) -(War Sailors 2023)

April 27, 1940 (Into the White 2011)

June 4, 1940 -Churchill gives “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech (Darkest Hour 2017) -Dunkirk Evaluation (Dunkirk 2017)

July 10-October 31, 1940 Battle of Britain (Battle of Britain 1969)

1941

May 1941 (Call to Spy 2019)

June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa -(Fortress of War [The Brest Fortres 2010) -(Defiance 2008)

September 8, 1941, Siege of Leningrad begins. -(Battle of Leningrad [Saving Leningrad] 2019) -(Leningrad 2009)

October 1941 Battle of Moscow (The Last Frontier [The Final Stand] 2020)

October 1941 Battle of Sevastopol (Battle for Sevastopol 2015)

December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacks Pearl Harbor (Tora! Tora! Tora! 1970)

December 8, 1941 Japan invades Shanghai International Settlement (Empire of the Sun 1987)

1942

January 20, 1942, Wannsee Conference (Conspiracy 2001)

February 1942 Battle of the Atlantic (Greyhound 2020)

February 1942 (The Railway Man 2013)

February 19, 1942, Bombing of Darwin (Australia 2008)

Spring 1942 (U-571 2000)

April 18, 1942 The Doolittle Raid (In Harm’s Way 2018)

June 4, 1942 Battle of Midway (Midway 2019)

1942 Summer Occupation of Jersey Island (Another Mother’s Son 2017 Prime)

July, 10 1942 Easy Company Trains in Camp Tocca (Band of Brothers 01x10 Currahee 2001)

July 21, 1942, Kokoda Track Campaign (Kokoda: 39th Battalion 2006)

August 7, 1942, 1st Marine Division land on Guadalcanal (The Pacific Ep. 1 Guadalcanal/Leckie 2010)

August 19, 1942, Dieppe Raid (Dieppe 1993)

August 23, 1942 Battle of Stalingrad begins (Stalingrad 1993)

September 1942 Formation of Troop 30 (Age of Heroes 2011)

September 18, 1942, 7th Marines Land on Guadalcanal (The Pacific Ep. 2 Basilone 2010)

Autumn of 1942 Battle of the Atlantic (Das Boot 1981)

October 18, 1942, Operation Grouse (Heavy Water War Ep. 2 2015)

November 8, 1942, Operation Torch (The Big Red One 1980)

November 10-17 1942 Vasily Zaytsev kills 225 German Soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad (Enemy at the Gates 2001)

December 1942 The 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal is relieved (The Pacific Ep. 3 Melbourne 2010)

December 15, 1942, Battle of Mount Austen (Thin Red Line 1998)

1943

March 13-14 1943, liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto -(Schindler’s List 1993)

April 17, 1943 Operation Mincemeat (Operation Mincemeat 2021)

April 19, 1943, beginning of the Warsaw Uprising (Uprising 2001)

May 4, 1943, Final Mission of The Memphis Bell (Memphis Bell 1990)

May 15, 1943, Salamo Arouch and his family arrive in Auschwitz Concentration Camp (Triumph of the Spirit 1989)

May 27, 1943 Louis Zamperini plane crashes on a search and rescue mission (Unbroken 2014)

May 30, 1943 first All-American Girls Professional Baseball League game played (A League of Their Own 1992)

June 25, 1943, 100th Bomb Group flew its first 8th Air Force combat mission (Master of the Air: Part One 2024)

July 1943 -(The Tuskegee Airmen 1995) -(The Liberator Ep. 1 2020) -(Heavy Water War Ep. 5 2015)

July 16, 1943, The 100th Bomb Group bombed U-Boats in Tronbhdim (Masters of the Air: Part Two 2024)

August 17, 1943 the 4th Bomb Wing of the 100th Bomb Group bombed Regenberg (Masters of the Air: Part Three 2024)

September 16, 1943, William Quinn and Charles Bailey leave Belgium (Masters of the Air: Part Four 2024)

September 18, 1943 John ‘Bucky’ Egan returns from leave to join the mission to bomb Munster (Master of the Air: Part Five 2024

October 14, 1943, John ‘Bucky’ Egan interrogated at Dulag Lut, Frankfurt Germany (Masters of the Air: Part Six 2024)

December 26, 1943, 1st Marine Division lands on Cape Gloucester (The Pacific Ep. 4 Gloucester/Pavuvu/Banika 2010)

1944

January 22, 1944, Battle of Anzio -(The Liberator Ep. 2 2020) -(Red Tails 2012) -(Anzio 1968)

February 20, 1944, Hydro Ferry bombing (Heavy Water War Ep. 6 2015)

March 7, 1944, Stalag Luft III Sagan, Germany, Germans find the concealed radio Bucky was using to learn news of the War (Master of the Air: Part Seven 2024)

March 24/25, 1944 Allied Mass Escape of Stalag Luft III (The Great Escape 1963)

June 1944 (Cross of Iron 1977)

June 6, 1944, 00:48 & 01:40 First airborne troops begin to land on Normandy (Band of Brothers 02x10 Day of Days 2001)

June 6, 1944, 06:30 D-Day landings -(Storming Juno 2010)

-(Saving Private Ryan 1998)

June 10, 1944, Easy Company Takes Carentan (Band of Brothers 03x10 Carentan 2001)

June 15-July 9, 1944 Battle of Saipan

-(Windtalkers 2002)

-(Oba: The Last Samurai 2011)

July, 1944 The Monuments Men land in Normandy (The Monuments Men 2014)

July 20, 1944 Operation Valkyrie (Valkyrie 2008)

August 12, 1944, The 332nd Fighter Group attack Radar stations in Southern France (Masters of the Air: Part Eight 2024)

September 15, 1944, U.S. Marines landed on Peleliu at 08:32 (the Pacific Ep. 5 2010)

September 16, 1944, U.S Marines take Peleliu Airfield (the Pacific Ep. 5 2010)

September 17, 1944, Operation Market Garden

-(Band of Brothers 04x10 Replacements 2001)

-(A Bridge Too Far 1977)

October 2, 1944 Battle of Scheldt (Forgotten Battle 2021)

October 12, 1944, Battle of Peleliu, Assault on Bloody Nose Ridge (the Pacific Ep. 7 Peleliu Hills 2010)

October 13, 1944, Rovaniemi public buildings were destroyed (Sisu 2022)

October 14, 1944, Erwin Rommel is arrested (Rommel 2012 Prime)

October 22/23, 1944, 2100 – 0200 Operation Pegasus (Band of Brothers 05x10 Crossroads 2001)

November 1944 middle of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest (When Trumpets Fade 1998)

December 16, 1944, Battle of the Bulge (Band of Brothers 06x10 Bastogne 2001)

December 1944 (Hart’s War 2002)

1945

January 2, 1945 (The Liberator Ep 3 2020)

January 10, 1945 (Attack Force Z)

January 13, 1945, Battle of Foy (Band of Brothers 07x10 The Breaking Point 2001)

January 30, 1945 The Raid at Cabanatuan (The Great Raid 2002)

February 14, 1945, David Webb rejoins the 506th in Haguenau (Band of Brothers 08x10 The Last Patrol 2001)

February 19, 1945, Battle of Iwo Jima starts. - (Letters from Iwo Jima 2006) - (The Pacific Ep. 8 Iwo Jima 2010) - (Flags of our Fathers 2006)

March 21, 1945, Operation Carthage (The Bombardment 2021)

April, 1945 (Fury 2014)

April 5, 1945, 506th Finds abandoned Concentration Camp (Band of Brothers 09x10 Why We Fight 2001)

April 26, 1945, near the end of the war in Europe (A Woman in Berlin 2008)

April 29, 1945, 45th Infantry Division liberated Dachau Concentration camp (The Liberator Ep. 4 2020)

May 2, 1945, Fall of Berlin -(Downfall 2004) -(Jojo Rabbit 2019)

May 1945 Battle of Okinawa -(Hacksaw Ridge 2016) -(The Pacific Ep. 9 Okinawa 2010)

May 7, 1945, Germany Surrenders V-E Day - (Master of the Air: Part Nine 2024) - (Band of Brothers 10x10 Points 2001)

July 30, 1945, USS Indianapolis sank. (USS Indianapolis 2016)

August 15, 1945, The Empire of Japan surrenders end of the War. -(Oppenheimer 2023) -(The Pacific Part Ten: Home 2010)

September 11, 1945 US Military search and Arrest Japanese Leaders for war crimes (Emperor 2012)

1946 April 29, 1946 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (Tokyo Trial 2016)

#band of brothers #masters of the air #the pacific #hbo war fandom #WW2 movies

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just-barrow · 2 months

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Interview below the cut:

‘I learned on the job’: Ben Mendelsohn’s new look

By Michael Idato

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Captured by the lens of cinematographer Jaime Reynoso, Ben Mendelsohn’s Christian Dior cuts a slender, stylish figure in Apple TV’s The New Look. Mendelsohn delivers a luminous performance, played with nuance and subcutaneous emotion. What is not immediately apparent is that it all started in the most unpretentious of places: footy games and pizza nights.

Behind the new series sits an important friendship between Mendelsohn and writer/director Todd A. Kessler, formed in 2015 when Kessler cast Mendelsohn as family black sheep Danny Rayburn in his critically acclaimed Netflix thriller Bloodlines. Since then, the 54-year-old Melbourne-born actor says, an enduring friendship has formed.

“Todd is the easiest person, the most unstressed, unpretentious sort of person to be around,” Mendelsohn says. “I’ve taken him to meet everyone. I’ve taken him to the footy with all my mates. He’s one of those kind of guys. It was definitely the Roosters, but I can’t remember who they were playing,” adding with a grin: “I wish it was a Storm game because obviously, we’re better.”

The New Look sprang into being one night when Kessler “was at my joint, and he was knocking up a pizza from scratch,” Mendelsohn says. Kessler, who is a passionate reader of biographies, had started talking about the renowned French fashion designer Christian Dior, and about Dior’s “personal self, like an authentic self, if you like, and this other self, which he hates. He hates himself for not being able to be his authentic self while he conducts his business.”

“I just turned to him and said, well, when can we do this? Because I didn’t need any more than that,” Mendelsohn adds. “That’s such a universal kind of starting place. And I just went, well, when can we do it? Because after Bloodline, I’d do anything to try and work with him again on something where we’ve got a shot.”

In its final form, The New Look has more than a shot. It comes with a brilliant cast: Mendelsohn as Dior, French star Juliette Binoche as designer Coco Chanel, John Malkovich as Lucien Lelong, the French couturier in whose workroom Dior’s career began, and Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams as Dior’s sister Catherine, a French resistance fighter.

Written by Kessler with Jason and David Rabe, Amanda Coe, Carter Harris, Dani Vetere and Ning Zhou, the series explores the rise of Dior, his creation of “the New Look”, which revolutionised French fashion, his rivalry with Chanel and his close connection to his sister Catherine. Featured among the supporting cast: Cristobal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin and others. In terms of modern fashion history, it is an A-list lineup.

That “the New Look” was transformational for the Christian Dior brand speaks for itself. Founded in 1947, it took just seven years for Dior to account for half of Paris’s fashion export industry. It is owned today by the luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, headed by Bernard Arnault.

For Ben Mendelsohn, a boy who was raised on the outskirts of Melbourne, however, that’s a lot of haute couture history to take in. What does the starting point for researching a role like this look like? I ask Mendelsohn. “It looks bare,” he replies, smiling.

As an actor, he explains, he began with the man more than the world he inhabited. “When you’re coming at it, from my point of view, it looks like you want to build a frame, just a frame, and you don’t want to concern yourself where everything’s going to go and get all wound up in that because that’s not where the action is,” he says. “The action is this little field where you can try and surf.”

Mendelsohn took in “a sense of curiosity, unsureness, and I wanted to make sure I could hear the other person. That’s what I wanted to do. To try to get the mechanics of the accent, a sense of what the fabric world is like, what this is like, the family life, that kind of stuff. And that’s it. That’s it.”

Why? “Because I got taught by [Anthony] Hopkins something very, very important, and it changed the way I worked,” he says, declining to go into the details of what was contained in Hopkins’ acting tutorial. [The pair worked together on Spotswood in 1991, when Mendelsohn was just 22.] “I learned along the way,” he adds. “I learned on the job, talking to people.”

Perhaps the most striking revelation in the scripts themselves is not so much that life in World War II-era Paris was complicated – it was, as the history books attest to – but that not everyone’s loyalties lay where you might assume. Louis Vuitton, for example, had ties to the French [pro-Nazi] Vichy regime. Hugo Boss designed Nazi uniforms. Chanel was, for all intents and purposes, a Nazi spy. Cristobal Balenciaga was close to Spain’s Hitler-ally, General Franco. The list goes on.

Mendelsohn refrains from weighing in with an opinion except to say, essentially, that the historical record is there for examination. “I think as Aussies, we have a really strong sense of certainty about certain things; we have a high barrier for what’s good and what’s not,” he says.

What is in the series, he adds, is “the journey of that and the journey of how do you be in the world when you have this self that you don’t necessarily feel an overwhelming greatness about? How do you interact with it with values, integrity that meets reality and [situations where] you must adjust or fall off the side″⁣.

“In the modern world, that’s got a really beautiful message because [Dior] is a very sensitive person, he’s a person with a lot of insecurities, a lot of doubt. He doesn’t feel good about himself in many, many ways,” Mendelsohn says. “And yet he steps forward.”

Kessler, speaking in a separate conversation, attributes what many might feel is a free pass for a brand like Chanel, to the slow exposure of the extent of Coco Chanel’s interactions with the Nazis. Much of the detail was kept in government archives which were not released until years after the war, “and by then, many of the people spoken about had passed away, and it didn’t make much news at the time”, Kessler says.

A few days before our interview, speaking at a press event, Mendelsohn articulated the struggle to position the work of artists in the wider spectrum of both their personal politics and, in Chanel’s case, events taking place around her.

“I think that you can admire the work, you can be moved by the creation, and you can have a sense of that person behind it or not,” Mendelsohn said. “It doesn’t stop the power of the creation and as to how one feels about the person, well, that’s dependent on any number of things.

“We’re not trying to paint sort of a moral story here, we’re just really trying to look at the circumstances and people that are trying to find their way through it and how they do it, coming from where they come from,” Mendelsohn added.

To some extent, Dior himself comes out of The New Look historically unscathed. At the same time, Caroline Bongrand, the fashion historian and former editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine L’Officiel, has described Dior as a man who suffered a lifetime of heartbreaks, including the painful secret of his sexuality.

That secret, coupled with his professional commitment to the creation of objects of beauty, created a kind of binary, the idea of a man divided by his pain and his joy. As an actor, I ask Mendelsohn, does he understand that conflict, as an authentic self himself with a library of performed false selves; as a man of a thousand faces, does he understand a man with two?

“I would think that Christian had a lot more than two,” Mendelsohn replies, with a wry smile. “I think I’m more interested in trying to just bring to life a sense of this particular narrative about him. In terms of the stuff about sexuality, I just felt like culturally we’d already won that space.

“Going back into that would be diverting what we were hoping to do,” Mendelsohn says. “I don’t think the same in such a binary sense, but I don’t know as much as [Caroline Bongrand] does, and that’s a very deliberate choice. I want to know enough that I can get a resonant sense, a vibe if you like, and then I want to dream into whatever it is to do the scene in the moment.”

The series’ costume designer Karen Muller Serreau was another critical relationship, not just because she dressed Mendelsohn in duplicates of Dior’s clothes, but because she also created the duplicate Dior collections that feature in the series. To be clear, the series used no vintage pieces; Muller Serreau was granted access to Dior’s heritage archives, where the original collections are stored, in order to create the duplicates.

“She’s incredible, and it’s an incredible achievement,” Mendelsohn says. Muller Serreau’s knowledge, he says, was critical in filling the gaps in his own. “I try as much as I can to swim in my lane and [depend on] those who are expert to tell me what it’s going to be. I approach it much more like a kelpie, than I do as a guy that stands at the top with a sense of solid knowing.

“And when I go and do it on the floor, I’m not giving you a certainty, I’m just giving a proposition,” Mendelsohn adds. “It’s just a proposition every time. And I’m standing well beneath an audience, trying to offer it up, imagining you as much more able to read and understand things than I am, but giving it my best and trying to do so with sort of a love letter vibe.”

In one sense, Mendelsohn doesn’t give himself enough credit. His performance in The New Look is remarkable, the confirmation of an actor whose career has taken him from Danny Clarke in The Big Steal (1990) and Dazey in Metal Skin (1994), to Pope in Animal Kingdom (2010) and Henry IV in David Michod’s The King (2019), with a thrilling stopover in Rogue One, as Orson Krennic, in an unforgettable face-to-mask meeting with Darth Vader.

“They are all there, [but] it’s very easy to confuse the piece that an audience takes to be the thing that it was [because] what you carry with you is the whole history of working those long, long days in those long, long things.” Mendelsohn adds that much of the time he was “not necessarily feeling very confident about anything, or while demonstrating this sort of pose of like, yeah, I can do it all.”

When he looks in the mirror, even in costume, he still sees himself, not the character he is playing. “When I was younger, it bothered me a lot more; the real thing I lament about [the face] is its pathways are very, very set. I used to wish that I could somehow train the face to do completely different things, But what happened is that I’ve become less concerned with trying to control it or trying to manoeuvre it for effect.”

But, he adds, there are echoes of all them – Danny, Dazey, Pope, Orson Krennic and Henry IV – still with him. “They’re all there. And the ones that are the most important end up being the ones that people love, and Babyteeth, for instance, will remain incredibly important, whether or not it’s taken up,” he says.

“When people love them, they stay in you,” he says. “Danny, Trevor [from 1987’s The Year My Voice Broke], there’s a lot of them ... just moments, moments and moments. And I’ve got 40 years of them, mate. I wasn’t looking to become an actor. I really wasn’t. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”

The New Look is on Apple TV.

#ben mendelsohn #the new look

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