Category: draft

In Conversation: M. Night Shyamalan

Posted January 7, 2019

Over the course of a 20-year filmmaking career, from the breakout The Sixth Sense through critical duds like The Happening and After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan has made, in his words, “a bunch of movies that were really successful and then a bunch of movies that people didn’t like.” Recently, he’s back to making movies people like the hit slasher-film-with-a-twist Split, about a killer with multiple personalities — the twist being that the film is revealed in its final moments to be a sequel to Shyamalan’s moody proto–superhero thriller Unbreakable. At an 8 a.m. breakfast Shyamalan is cheerful and engaging, […]

Luke Evans swaps the valleys for the Shire

Posted December 24, 2013

At the age of 30, this Welsh actor became an overnight success. Now he’s playing dragon-slayers and Draculas in big-budget movies “They were the first victim of my career,” sighs Luke Evans ruefully. He was very attached to his tropical fish; at the end of each day he’d melt into a beanbag and gaze at them endlessly. But as the movies got bigger, stealing him from his London home for months at a time, they had to go. “These discus were beautiful. The fish man came into my house and scooped them out into bags, gave me £20 for them. […]

Ryan Reynolds Gets His Swagger Back

Posted August 29, 2013

Ryan Reynolds has been living in the Berlin hotel for five weeks while shooting the director Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices. I chose this gallery in the Mitte neighborhood because it was walking distance from the hotel and, from the photos on its website, seemed to be hosting an exhibit about motorcycles, another of Reynolds’ favorite subjects. But this is not what happens. To trail him through the gallery’s many odd and then odder rooms is to be shotgunned with more raunchy comic riffs and one-liners than are contained on a complete DVD set of Family Guy. (A DVD set, by […]

Chris Hemsworth| Hero Worship

Posted July 12, 2012

They are waiting for Thor. It’s a few days before the U.S. premiere of The Avengers, which will zoom to a staggering $200 million opening weekend, and outside a downtown New York hotel, fans cluster, hoping for an autograph, an iPhone pic, a glimpse of the brawny 28-year-old Australian actor. He is Chris Hemsworth, not yet a household name but a confident bet to be one—still new enough to movies that he’s not weary of this fuss or the global promotional haul that has shipped him and his blond ­ponytail from Los Angeles to France to Russia, then Germany and […]

A Nice Quiet Chat with Christian Bale

Posted June 1, 2009

He slips into the room without fanfare. He walks slowly, on his heels, toward the terrace. When I stand, he points at me, or my table, or my general area still without turning to look at me, his eyes fixed on the terrace in front of him – and in his low English accent asks, “We doin’ this here or what?” Christian Bale detests interviews, on the predictable grounds that his offscreen life is nobody’s business, but also because he thinks the whole enterprise of movie-star “journalism” is corrosive to acting and storytelling.  This opener “here or what?” is less […]

Supernatural Sexy. Scary. Over?

Posted April 24, 2009

In the intense universe of fandom surrounding Supernatural — the CW series that follows the chisel-jawed Winchester brothers — there are ”Sam girls” and ”Dean girls.” Websites chronicle every scrap of minutiae (including the fellas’ sweet ride, a ’67 Chevy Impala), and bloggers dig around casting directors’ sites looking for snippets of scenes to post online (they’ve even managed to spoil entire scripts). One creative fan actually showed up on set in an orange vest, pretending to be a production assistant. ”They gave her a walkie-talkie!” recalls Ackles. ”She worked the entire day there until somebody finally figured it out. […]

Angelina Jolie Dies for Our Sins

Posted July 17, 2007

There is a question people ask when they hear you’ve met with Angelina Jolie. It is not about her work in Darfur, her work with children orphaned by AIDS. It’s this: Is she…sexy?  Her sexiness is supposed to be larger than life, but in fact it’s smaller, because it shows through in her gestures and in the details of her beauty. And so it’s not the main thing when you meet her. “I entered this business before I had focus and purpose in my life. I was very unhappy, very unhealthy, and when I sat down for an interview, I […]

BayWatch

Posted September 1, 2006

In his Santa Monica headquarters, director Michael Bay is preceded down the hallway by two gigantic beasts. The flesh-colored English mastiff named Mason (after Sean Connery’s character in The Rock) is roughly the size of a Shetland pony. Grace (named after Liv Tyler’s character in Armageddon) is a year-old puppy, nearing the size where she too could be fitted for a saddle. As Bay steps into an office decorated with such props as the model for the space shuttle from Armageddon and a bomb from Pearl Harbor, he explains that his beloved canines recently forced him to trade in his […]

Brad Pitt| The Celebrity

Posted June 1, 2006

He lured the paparazzi to Africa, where people really needed the attention. If it wasn’t for Brad Pitt, most Americans would never have heard of Namibia. They might not know about AIDS orphans in South Africa, or the plight of children in Haiti, or what transpired at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Pitt, 42, has been a movie star for 15 years—and a paparazzi target for nearly as long. Celebrity mags have made millions reporting on his love life, and the obsession only intensified when he began romancing Angelina Jolie. So he started fighting back—but not by punching […]

The times of their lives starring Wentworth Miller

Posted February 1, 2005

RW: Your first major film, The Human Stain, dealt with race and identity, so I know it’s something you’ve spoken about at length. Is it a subject you’re sick of talking about?WM: I was when the movie came out. Part of me thought, I don’t want to be forever linked with this issue as an actor. But at the same time I thought the movie spoke to such important and often unaddressed issues that it was necessary to talk about it. I’m very proud of The Human Stain, but it was not a critical or commercial success; I think part […]