It was their shared instinct to run toward the truth – even when difficult and dark – that drew King and Lerman to their latest starring roles in Hulu’s Holocaust drama “We Were the Lucky Ones.” 

Based on Georgia Hunter’s 2017 book of the same name, which documents her family’s fight for survival and unity as the Nazi persecution of Jews took hold of Poland during World War II, the Erica Lipez-created, eight-episode limited series charts the Kurc family’s unbelievable true story. Forcefully scattered around the world following Germany’s invasion in 1939 and eventually brought back together at war’s end, the Kurcs open the series as an affluent Radom-based Jewish clan sitting at the table for Passover and end it as that same family – nine years older, battle-scarred and bruised – sitting for the Seder once again. 

For TheWrap’s digital cover story, presented by Hulu, Lerman said in conversation with King that while he typically has “a hard time” with stories regarding the Holocaust and World War II because “they can easily feel exploitative” of the Jewish experience, “We Were the Lucky Ones” felt like it was contributing to the canon in new and resonant ways. This was particularly seen in the series’ family-driven struggles outside of concentration camps and in that his character, Addy, was a refugee in Paris and later Brazil. 

“It was really appealing to explore the Jewish refugee experience, which I really hadn’t seen before,” he told TheWrap. “There’s a universal thing at the core of this: It’s about people that are at the center of these conflicts and the real human stories and human suffering that happens in the middle of an event like this. So if we can find angles that haven’t been explored before and ways to tell these stories, I think we should tell them.”

He added: “But it’s hard to find those stories, especially ones that are as beautifully written as this.”

King, Lerman’s longtime friend and former “Bullet Train” costar, agreed that “We Were the Lucky Ones” “felt like we were adding to the history” of Holocaust dramatizations by showing the visceral, heartbreaking experience of a family forced apart by war and hate. 

Her character, Halina, is the youngest of the family and shares a particularly strong bond with Addy, even while he was in Paris pursuing a career as a composer and musician. As Nazi soldiers occupy their city, she stays with her parents, who refuse to flee despite mounting pressures and apparent threats to their safety. Hiding her identity and passing herself as Aryan, Halina also felt like a singular voice in a market already featuring a number of definitive Holocaust and World War II renderings. 

“She’s hiding her identity, and a lot of Jewish people had to do that,” King said of her role. “It’s not a story of a family in concentration camps. It’s a story of them maneuvering their way through Europe somehow. It’s just miracle after miracle — that’s why it’s called ‘We Were the Lucky Ones,’ because it’s just insane that this happened. It’s truly miraculous. And so I think any new experience as a true story that’s told about this time adds something.”

To see the real family members of the people we’re portraying… added a different level of connection to the material and to the experience”

Logan Lerman

There’s a sequence in the finale episode of “We Were the Lucky Ones,” titled “Rio,” where Halina’s years-spanning strategy to hide in plain sight is thwarted by a former neighbor who turns her in to local authorities. Halina is beaten down, bloodied and broken by her arresting officers and held with other suspected Jews in a cold, lightless cell. Staring into the middle distance from the cement ground, blood pooling around her, it’s a years-old memory of her brother Addy’s promise to wait for her from earlier in the series that keeps her looking to the future. 

King reflected that her own personal relationship with Lerman over the last 11 years allowed her to genuinely pull on that longing to be with him again – especially when she was stuck filming much of the series’ most dramatic traumas in isolation. She recalled reading the prison cell scene from the finale and hoping that it meant Lerman would be filming with her that day. 

“I found out he wasn’t going to be on set because it was supposed to be a flashback of something we’ve already shot before, and it was  funny because I got so sad because I had missed Logan, I hadn’t been seeing him a lot lately at that point,” King said. “I love Logan so much and I feel very connected to Logan in this way where I was like, he’s one of my best friends, I haven’t seen him in forever, and I was feeling this pain of missing him. And I was like, this is actually kind of helpful because Halina’s missing her brother so much and Logan has become like family to me. I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is just a very small fraction of the pain of missing that Halina must be feeling.’”

That straight-to-the-heart connection to the material was felt in all aspects of production, largely thanks to author Hunter’s consistent presence and involvement on set with her family. King and Lerman never forgot that they were telling the equal parts horrific and inspiring true story of someone’s bloodline. 

Getting the opportunity to tell a story like this, it always feels timely”

Joey King

Lerman said that having Hunter and her family available as a resource and support “transcended production.”

“To see the real family members of the people we’re portraying there, watching us, seeing us in our wardrobe, seeing us go through these scenes, walking through sets that were recreations of their family’s lives, that added a different level of connection to the material and to the experience,” he said. 

As for the real-world repercussions of telling the Kurc family’s story today, it’s not lost on the Hulu series stars that it debuted as rates of antisemitism continue spiking nationwide and the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas makes daily headlines and stirs divide the world over. Spotlighting the Jewish peoples’ varied histories of persecution and hardship is the artist’s way of combating such tensions. 

In other words, they’re continuing to be truth-tellers in the face of it. 

“How could it not feel relevant right now to tell a story like this?” Lerman posed. 

“The state of the world is in a very difficult spot right now. Racism, islamophobia, antisemitism – it’s all just, it’s really sad … Getting the opportunity to tell a story like this, it always feels timely,” King said. 

“As actors, we don’t always get to tell material that is something that is close to home – a lot of the time, we’re playing people we have absolutely nothing in common with, which is the coolest part about acting. But it’s very beautiful and rare we get to do something that taps right here,” she added, indicating to her heart.

Dessi Gomez contributed to this story.

Credits:
Creative Director & Photographer: Jeff Vespa
Video Production: Thadd Williams

Joey King’s Wardrobe: Suit by Cong Tri, Earrings by Hugo Kreit, Ring by Dries Criel Jewelry, Ring by Type Jewelry, Shoes by Andrea Wazen
Stylist: Jared Eng Studios
Hair: Rena Calhoun
Nails: Thuy Nguyen
Makeup: Allan Avendano

Logan Lerman’s Wardrobe: Jacket by All Saints, Sweater by Prada, Shirt by Hanes, Jeans Vintage Levi’s, Watch by Omega

The post ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Stars Joey King and Logan Lerman on Resilience, Heartache and the Power of the Human Spirit | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

The Fox drama series went through a creative shift this year following the sudden death of costar Adan Canto from appendiceal cancer, which rocked the production as they were forced to find a way to honor Canto while working through their grief.

“It’s been a very emotional season for me personally,” Yung told TheWrap for our “The Cleaning Lady” digital cover story presented by Fox. “It’s been hard and also beautiful, because I get to do it with people I truly love, and to honor Adan’s memory throughout the filming.”

With her protector and confidante Arman Morales missing, Season 3 found Yung’s lead character Thony De La Rosa balancing caring for her son Luca, investigating the circumstances behind his absence and working to bring her sister-in-law Fiona (Martha Millan) back home after getting deported to the Philippines.

By the time Thony found Canto’s Arman halfway through the season, he sacrificed himself to save her one last time, ending his time on the show as a hero.

Showrunners Miranda Kwok and Jeannine Renshaw previously told TheWrap that they focused the season on Arman’s disappearance with the hope that Canto would return after getting through treatment. But Canto’s death in January sealed his character’s fate, with Arman dying in the sixth episode.

The loss of Arman certainly changed Thony. Previous seasons found Yung’s character thrust into Arman’s criminal endeavors after accidentally witnessing a murder, fueled by both her growing feelings for Arman and his ability to help her provide adequate healthcare for her son Luca, who suffers from an autoimmune disease. Thony increasingly got her hands dirty as she moved from cleaning up the occasional crime scene to helping launder money and chopping up bodies.

For Yung, Thony’s evolution as a character arrived as she’s become more comfortable navigating the criminal elements of the series. By Season 2, Thony went into “autopilot,” focusing on performing the crime at hand without much thought, given she had to do it to save her son. By Season 3, Yung said “it’s not new to her.”

“She’s alone navigating this now, but she’s experienced in this world. She’s grown in all manner, and she’s more decisive. She knows what she wants and how to speak their language and navigate through [to get it],” Yung said.

But even as Thony lost the guardrails provided by Arman’s protection, she did not deviate from her primary goal of ensuring her family was safe — even from the circumstances brought upon by her actions.

“[She’s driven by] this protective mother instinct, and she probably fell in love with Arman, so that guided her path as well,” Yung said. “But I do not believe that she’s attracted to [the life of] crime. I don’t think she wants that for herself or her family.”

Fans can’t get enough of Thony’s wild adventures on “The Cleaning Lady.” The show is Yung’s first major series regular role in the U.S. since rising to prominence playing Elektra Natchios in Netflix’s “Daredevil” and “The Defenders,” which came on the heels of roles in films like “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” and “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.”

It’s the first time I’ve been asked to portray a woman of Cambodian background and I’m very proud of it .”

Like many first-time series regulars, Yung landed the role of Thony after a rigorous audition process. The Fox drama is based on the Argentine telenovela “La chica que limpia,” but once Yung was cast, the creative team incorporated the actor’s Cambodian and Filipino roots into the character. It became the first network drama series to star a Southeast Asian lead, specifically one of Cambodian descent.

“It’s the first time I’ve been asked to portray a woman of Cambodian background and I’m very proud of it … it allows me to share a bit of that side of my culture, my dad’s side,” Yung said. “I love how it’s been received by the Filipino community, the Cambodian community … I do feel like I’m carrying a banner.”

Merely chronicling Thony and her family’s life in Las Vegas gives “The Cleaning Lady” an inherently political backbone given that the character is an undocumented immigrant. The show has explored the inhumane treatment of these immigrants through storylines on the show, and Yung credited the series for tackling these issues tactfully.

“We do bring topics to the table — like deportation, like the ICE raid that we had — so there are discussions [among viewers]… and I think it’s cleverly done in this show,” Yung said.

Above all, the most pivotal relationship at the center of “The Cleaning Lady” is between Thony and her son Luca (played by twins Sebastien and Valentino LaSalle). Yung said watching her young costars’ growth has been “a privilege” for the past three seasons.

“They both have very different personalities,” she said. “Seb brings more emotion, and Val brings more playfulness… so they have different things that they bring…. Fiona’s house does feel like our house between takes. They just play around, it’s really nice.”

With the show renewed for Season 4, “The Cleaning Lady” is set to run beyond its two-hour season finale on Tuesday, May 21. The installment is poised to bring another surge of creativity for the drama series, coming off a grief-stricken season with a new showrunner in charge following Kwok and Renshaw’s exits.

But Yung and the De La Rosas remain, ensuring that Thony’s unconditional love for her son and family also stay at the core of whatever shenanigans her character finds herself in next.

“I don’t know where we should go, but I know we should keep this essence she has [that comes] from her endless love for her family… the drive that she has and the resilience she has,” Yung said. “The show is extremely entertaining, but to me it’s important that I relate to the character, so the audience can relate as well… so I want to keep her human.”

Yung continued, “It’s important for me for me that things stay grounded. I want her to be a woman struggling through life.”

“The Cleaning Lady” Season 3 finale airs Tuesday, May 21, on Fox. Past episodes are available to stream on Max and Hulu.

Credits:
Creative Director & Photographer: Jeff Vespa
Wardrobe: Jacket by Vegan Tiger, Bodysuit by Steven Khalil, Dress by Julie Colquitt, Ring by Charlie Lapson, Ring by Brosway
Stylist: Michael Fusco
Hair: Marcus Francis
Makeup: Sarah Uslan
Video Production: Thadd Williams

The post How Élodie Yung Headlined a ‘Very Emotional’ Season of ‘The Cleaning Lady’ | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

The quote resonates with Brooks not just because it was imparted to her by Oprah Winfrey, who played Sofia in Steven Spielberg’s celebrated 1985 film, but because it confirms that she belongs in the role of the outspoken young woman who refuses to be cowed by bigotry in the Jim Crow South.

The words reminded Brooks that she represented the many different Sofias — the real-life versions of the character out there and the many actresses who have portrayed her over the years — but that she was the one playing the role in this film, directed by Blitz Bazawule. 

The actress, who broke out with her role in the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” is still grappling with the increased visibility that’s coming with “The Color Purple” — which opens in theaters on Dec. 25 — and the growing buzz around her layered performance.

Sofia says “hell no” to injustice, and commands scene after scene — sometimes with humor, as when she responds to the misogynist Mister (Colman Domingo), and sometimes with pure devastating emotion, as in the third act, when she’s thrown in jail. “People are writing me monologues in DMs. I’m getting voice memos that are five minutes long. I’m getting calls from people I’ve never heard from in years,” Brooks said during an interview with TheWrap. 

It’s a heady change from the decades of self-doubt the actress has battled during her career. Born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina, Brooks, 34, started acting at age six, in a church nativity play. When she was eight, she saw the 1997 made-for-TV remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” and Natalie Desselle Reid’s performance as the evil stepsister Minerva made her think she might have a future in Hollywood.

“To see this full-figured woman in this Victorian dress, with this funky hair, just being so big and brash, not hiding, had vocals for days, moves for days, comedy for days — I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s me. I can do that.’” Brooks also nodded to Laura Winslow on the popular 1990s ABC sitcom “Family Matters” as an example of positive representation. But the doubts lingered. “It’s not that I didn’t see myself, but I saw myself very little,” she said. “Growing up, there was a huge lack of representation for dark skinned, plus size girls [who] were curvy.” 

That continued after Brooks graduated from Juilliard in 2011. “I was waitressing, babysitting, dog walking, typist,” she said. “Whatever I could do to make $20, I was doing it — besides selling myself.” Meeting casting agents was particularly nerve-wracking. “I was so confused on how to present myself to the world,” Brooks said. “Do I do curly hair? Do I straighten my hair? I can’t lighten my skin, so we’re gonna have to stick with that. How do I fit?” 

She credits a conversation with her future “The Color Purple” castmate, Colman Domingo, with giving her the push she needed. She first met him at the Signature Theatre in New York, after seeing him in “Passing Strange.”

“He was like, ‘How are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m really struggling. I don’t know if there is a place for me in this industry. I don’t know if I’m doing this right because Juilliard taught me how to act. It didn’t prepare me for this industry,’” she said. “He encouraged me and was like, ‘No, you can’t quit. You have to put one foot in front of the other. You can do this.’”

And then, “by the grace of God,” as Brooks put it, came Jenji Kohan’s Netflix series about women in prison, “Orange Is the New Black.” Inmate Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson proved to be Brooks’ breakout role, and she played the fan favorite character for all seven seasons of the dramedy’s run, from 2013 to 2019, picking up three NAACP Image Awards nominations along the way. 

In 2015, right in the middle of those seven seasons, Brooks’ life changed again when she landed the role of Sofia in the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple.” The performance earned her a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and a Grammy win for Best Musical Theater Album. (Later, in 2021, she scored her first Emmy nomination, for playing Mahalia Jackson in “Robin Roberts Presents: Mahalia” biopic for Lifetime.) 

Despite Brooks’ deep familiarity with Sofia, preparing to tell the story on the big screen presented a new challenge. She was wary of relying on (and by extension, measuring up to) Winfrey’s original Oscar-nominated performance. Still, she reached out to the powerhouse magnate, since she, along with Spielberg and Quincy Jones, are producers on the new film. “These are huge shoes to fill, not only because of Miss O’s legacy, but it is true, I am representing the 10,000,” Brooks said. “What she did [in her performance] was life-changing to so many people because of the healing that happened. I know that I have the same responsibility.”

The legacy of “The Color Purple” is far-reaching. And Brooks felt it during the new film’s production in Georgia every time she stepped on set. She thought about “being on a plantation, walking by trees and thinking about the people [who] might have been hung from those trees, feeling the dirt on your boots and actually getting dust in your face.” Shooting a scene where a white woman slaps Sofia produced a visceral reaction that took her off guard at first. “It brought up a lot of emotions for me that I used on-screen,” Brooks said. “I grew up in the South and I remember being called the N-word for the first time in third grade. There’s a lot of memories that come up, not only for myself, but the stories from my family that our land was stolen by the KKK back in the ’60s.”

My worth does not lie in any statue. I would love to have one, but that’s not where my worth lies.”

Danielle Brooks

As awards season heats up, Brooks is aware that she could be in the race for an Oscar nomination. But she’s trying to block all that chatter out, even though she is a lifelong fan of the Academy Awards. “I have definitely been that teenager watching all the award shows like it’s the Super Bowl — getting that sheet out with your friends to see who’s gonna be the winner,” she said. But, she added, “I have to know that my worth does not lie in any statue. I would love to have one, but that’s not where my worth lies. My worth lies in being the best mother I can be, the best wife I can be, a representation for people [who] don’t feel seen and heard.” (Brooks and her husband Dennis Gelin are parents to a preschool-age daughter.)

What she does take seriously is her increased self-confidence. “This definitely feels different,” she said. “I’m trying to learn how to stand in my power, and it’s exciting to start becoming the person you are inside without this doubt about it. For years, I’ve had doubts about am I good enough? Can I really achieve the things that I feel in my heart are possible? I’m at that point where I believe they are.”

Read more about the 2023 Changemakers here.

Digital Cover Credits
Creative Director: Jeff Vespa
Photo Editor: Tatiana Leiva
Styling: Jennifer Austin
Hair: Tish Celestine
Makeup: Renee Sanganoo

The post Danielle Brooks Is Learning How to ‘Stand in My Power’ With ‘The Color Purple’ | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

From “Romeo + Juliet” to “Moulin Rouge!” to “Elvis,” his films are each uniquely specific, traversing fresh genre territory in the way that only Baz Luhrmann can. Which is why it’s no surprise that “Faraway Downs,” a newly edited version of Luhrmann’s 2008 film “Australia” that includes nearly an hour of new footage, is anything but a retread.

In fact, Luhrmann was thinking about expanding his melodramatic epic starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman back when the film was being made.

“I think in the back of my mind I thought, ‘Well maybe one day I’ll release it in two parts with an interval,’ because I used to love those epics like ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’” Luhrmann told TheWrap for our “Faraway Downs” digital cover story presented by Hulu.

It’s also not lost on Luhrmann that between “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” long movies are in vogue at the moment. There’s never been a better time to get lost in a 220-minute melodrama divided into digestible chapters.

“Everyone’s complaining about length, length, length but what’s kind of interesting is a lot of movies right now, when you go out to the cinema, a lot of the films drawing people out are quite epic in nature,” he said.

Epic is an understatement when it comes to “Faraway Downs,” which charts the story of English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) who travels to the Australian outback in 1939 with the intention of selling her husband’s cattle ranch. A series of difficult events ensue, and Ashley’s path becomes intertwined with a grizzled, lonesome cattle drover (Hugh Jackman) and an indigenous Australian child named Nullah (Brandon Walters) caught up in the government’s draconian racial policy now referred to as the Stolen Generations.

Luhrmann’s 2 hour and 45 minute film “Australia” has been reimagined as the six-part “Faraway Downs,” which rolls out on Hulu in chapters on Nov. 26 complete with a new score and main titles for each installment — and a brand new ending.

The result is something richer and more complete than the film that was released in 2008. Or as Luhrmann describes it, a banquet vs. a meal. One doesn’t negate the other, but “Faraway Downs” is the full version of this particular story, which Luhrmann sparked to at a time when Hollywood was waiting to see his next move.

As the director was coming off the mammoth success of “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001, Luhrmann’s inspiration for “Australia” came from a desire to showcase his home country in a way it hadn’t before, but also to firmly plant roots in his homeland for his children.

“’Australia’ really came from my children, and the fact that they were very young, and that we were living all over the world,” he explained, noting that it takes “years” when he goes to make something. “I really wanted the kids to have Australian roots, but with international wings, I guess is a way of saying it,” he added before acknowledging the Baz-ism that just came out of his mouth:“Too arty?”

The only thing you really own is your story, and so you better make sure you’re living a good one.”

Luhrmann was also keen to put his own spin on the “great pastoral epics” he loved, but inside that genre he wanted to chronicle the issue of land rights for First Nations people. “The Stolen Generation is this incredibly painful and horrific scar on the history of the country, so the gesture was really to flip an old, melodramatic, sweeping epic from the perspective of a First Nations character, which ends up being Nullah.”

The “Stolen Generation” refers to the thousands of mixed-race indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families by the state and integrated into “white society.” It’s this issue that gets a larger focus in “Faraway Downs,” as the entire story is now told from Nullah’s point of view.

The idea to revisit unused footage from “Australia” came about during the pandemic, when production on Luhrmann’s Oscar-winning “Elvis” was shut down. He started looking at the scenes that were left on the cutting room floor and sparked to the notion of expanding the story in episodic format as a way of more clearly identifying the major theme.

“I felt that the underlying theme, which is you really can’t own anything, you can’t really own land, you can’t own a child – you can curate it, but you can’t own it. The only thing you really own is your story, and so you better make sure you’re living a good one. I was looking at the footage and realizing that now with the advent of streaming, I can really lean into that theme,” he said.

The notion of more fully embracing that theme also led Luhrmann to change the ending to the story. The ending in “Faraway Downs” was shot during the production of “Australia,” but jettisoned for a happier conclusion to that telling of the story due to the national mood at the time.

“There was a huge financial crisis [in America], I remember that. There was a real shift in the spirit of the world, there was a sense of deep insecurity and fear. I just remember that feeling and I was somewhat calibrating what I was doing to the audience’s feeling at the time,” Luhrmann recalled of his decision to go with the conclusion seen in “Australia.”

“Australia” opened on Nov. 26, 2008 in the United States and underwhelmed at the domestic box office despite a stronger performance overseas. The film would gross $49.5 million domestically compared to $161.5 million internationally, and Luhrmann acknowledged the Thanksgiving release date wasn’t his ideal choice (“Let’s just say it wasn’t crazy about the idea of releasing a film called ‘Australia’ on Thanksgiving”).

And yet, “Australia” is still Luhrmann’s most successful film in Europe and the film’s esteem has only grown over time. “Faraway Downs” isn’t so much Luhrmann’s “preferred” version of the story as it’s a more complete telling that allows the epic to breathe a bit more. Which begs the question, which ending is “correct?”

“It’s not that I go, ‘One ending is right or wrong,’” he said, but allowed that the ending of “Faraway Downs” is closer to his initial instinct when making “Australia.” “I was running back and forth sort of engineering the ending, and there was just such a negative spirit out there that the conclusion I came to was, ‘Ah, you know, maybe it’s just too tragic.’”

25 years later, Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman are even bigger stars than they were at the time, and Luhrmann said they’re both “really warm-hearted” about this new retelling. He’s also eager for audiences to see Jackman’s “cattleman craft” on full display. “I don’t think there’s anything physical that Hugh Jackman can’t actually do,” he said. “It’s not just that he does it, he does it like he’s done it all his life, with such grace and confidence. That was just something to behold.”

Ultimately, the filmmaker hopes viewers of “Faraway Downs” will give themselves over to this “richer” telling of the story in longform format, and he feels it’s coming out at a fortuitous time.

“The world is in such tumult, and it’s not just that it’s a world in which there is great rupture, but we’ve just come through the pandemic and all these things that just keep coming at us,” he said. “I think that what sustains in the story is no matter what happens, in the end, you can’t control anything. So live a great story. Live a great life. Don’t cower in fear, don’t shrink backwards.”

The filmmaker took a beat and concluded, “Go forward and embrace life and be in the moment.”

Credits:
Creative Director: Jeff Vespa
Photography: Hugh Stewart
Videography: Jeremy Gryst
Video Editor: Thadd Williams

The post Why Baz Luhrmann Revisited and Enriched ‘Australia’ With ‘Faraway Downs’ | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

“Anytime any Latino is recognized for their work it’s a great feeling,” the “Flamin’ Hot” filmmaker, producer and actress told TheWrap. “The whole point of doing what I do — whether it’s directing or producing — is to amplify the voices of the Latino community.”

Longoria was a successful actress in soaps before her breakout role in ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” and she subsequently launched her own production company to help spearhead shows and movies that showcase Latin American stories and people.

That drive to push boundaries in the entertainment sector is at the heart of TheWrap’s first-ever Latino Power List, which celebrates trailblazers changing the game for Latinos in media. The list spans actors, directors, writers, executives, dealmakers, journalists and up-and-comers who are setting the blueprint for future generations of Latino talent to bring their skillset into the Hollywood landscape.

Longoria reflected on the importance of publicly celebrating when Latinos succeed in this industry.

“This is an extension of the work that we have to continue to do to amplify the fact that we have success,” said Longoria, who is the cover subject for TheWrap’s Latino Power List. “Let’s make sure our peers see that and know that because that means that they’ll make more of these [projects], by more people like us.”

We’re making dents, but it’s still a lot of history and legacy to overcome.”

Alexis Garcia, EVP, Fifth Season

It’s a pivotal time to celebrate the diversity of voices in Hollywood. As the economic bubble in the streaming world pops, companies are reducing funding earmarked to produce original content. With that, many Latino-led series have been canceled in recent years. (We still mourn the early end of the “One Day at a Time” reboot, from honoree showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett.)

But it’s not just about increasing Latino-centered stories. The challenge comes with showing that Latino creators, executives and beyond can help build projects that resonate with all audiences. The individuals honored by TheWrap — like Fifth Season EVP and Latino Power List honoree Alexis Garcia, who personally closed major film deals like the sale of “Malcolm & Marie” to Netflix and “Cherry” to Apple — show how Latinos are already making significant contributions to the business, even without pushing for stories that are inherently tied to their race.

“You need that credibility, you need that leverage in order to get things done that are against the history of Hollywood,” Garcia said. “We’re making dents, but it’s still a lot of history and legacy to overcome.”

Population rises, representation stalls

Scripted content is still struggling to reflect the realities of the rising Latino population of the U.S. The Latino population in the United States reached 62.5 million in 2022, accounting for 19% of the country’s population, according to the U.S. Census. That is up from 13% in 2000. Yet according to the 2023 U.S. Latinos in Media report, from nonprofit think tank the Latino Donor Collaborative, between 2018 and August of 2023, the number of Latino leads only grew from 1% to 3.3% on TV, and from 1.4% to 5.7% in film . Fewer Latino-led projects are getting the green light, and recent shows face the uncertainty of renewal orders as the work stoppage keeps them from getting back into production.

Latino representation in Hollywood tracks significantly behind other large racial groups in the country. The LDC cited Nielsen data showing that Latino people make up only 7.1% of characters on screen. That compares with Black people making up 13.6% of the U.S. population but 21% of on-screen characters, while Asian American people make up 6.3% of the population and 7.6% of roles on screen.

“We have seen an exciting and much-needed diversification in entertainment content in recent years,” the report stated. “Unfortunately, Latinos have not benefited from this movement.”

Hope for tomorrow

As Latinos continue to fight for Hollywood representation, the individuals on TheWrap’s list keep hope alive for a more inclusive entertainment industry. Power List honoree Rita Moreno broke the ceiling for Latino performers in Hollywood with her Academy Award-winning performance in 1961’s “West Side Story” – but it was hard-won. One of the biggest lessons she wished she knew starting out in the industry was that she “had value as a performer.” In her autobiography, Moreno said that she faced racism and ostracism as an ethnic performer on the studio lot. Her Academy Award was a first for a Latina, even though she played the role in brownface — and it paved the way for Latino performers for decades to come.

Since then we’ve seen actors like honoree America Ferrera rise to superstardom in roles tied to their heritage (ABC’s “Ugly Betty”), and those that could have been played by a performer of any race (“Barbie.”) Up-and-comer honoree Iñaki Godoy led the cast of the hit Netflix adaptation of the “One Piece” manga to an impressive debut, and Latino performers like Pedro Pascal, Jenna Ortega and Camila Morrone earned their first Emmy nominations in 2023. This year also saw the release of major titles with Latinos in the lead roles, including the second season of “With Love,” created by Calderón-Kellet, the DC superhero film “Blue Beetle,” Prime Video’s “A Million Miles Away,” among others.

“It’s not so lonely anymore,” honoree Salma Hayek-Pinault told TheWrap. “When I started there were very few of us. Now it feels like more and more media is opening up to discover, enjoy and appreciate everything we have to offer.”

On her end, Longoria recently announced the launch of a new media holding company, Hyphenate Media Group, with the mission of providing creative-led projects with the tools to push through in an increasingly competitive environment.

“We’re definitely still underrepresented in front of and behind the camera. But I say that and in the same breath, I also want to applaud the things that we have,” Longoria said. “My life’s purpose is uplifting other Latino creators… [to use] my influence and my spotlight, and shine it on everyone who deserves to be heard and seen.”

Check out the complete list of honorees here.

Umberto Gonzalez contributed to this story.

Digital Cover Credits:
Photographer & Creative Director: Jeff Vespa
Hair: Amaran Grewal using L’Oréal Paris
Makeup: Elan Bongiorno using L’Oréal Paris

The post Latino Power List: Trailblazers Are Carving a Path, but Institutional Hurdles Persist appeared first on TheWrap.

Writer/director Chloe Domont’s debut feature, a steamy erotic thriller about the power dynamics between two young people (Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor) who both work as financial analysts for the same cutthroat hedge fund, is an unmitigated success. After a bidding war at Sundance, the film was snatched up by Netflix for a cool $20 million, and it’s now currently one of the most-watched new titles on the platform following its release earlier this month.

Johnson and Bergman met in 2002. “I had been trying to get my first movie ‘Brick’ made for eight years and failing at it,” Johnson told TheWrap. Then he crossed paths with Bergman, who Johnson said, “took pity on me and agreed to produce it.” Together, they launched T-Street in 2019.

It is also the first film made through the Emerging Filmmaker Program at T-Street, the production company formed by “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and “Knives Out” filmmaker Rian Johnson and his producing partner Ram Bergman. And that same incubator program formed in conjunction with Brye Adler and Jonathan Golfman of MRC, has also now produced one of the buzziest films out of the Toronto International Film Festival, “American Fiction.”

As far as the ethos of T-Street goes, Bergman said, it’s about being able to “work with good people that we think are talented and singular and just support them and guide them and just have fun making it.” This feels quaint by today’s standards, with production shingles talking about interconnected storytelling and the value of consumer-facing IP. “We’re not trying to build an empire,” Bergman added.

But what they are trying to do is encourage young filmmakers like Domont.

Building a Support System

For years, Bergman and Johnson had, as the “Looper” filmmaker said, “been very content with just making our own stuff.” He’d been wary of wanting to build “some bigger thing,” as he’d seen how that ambition can “swallow you.” “But the notion of this actually being something where we can support people but also learn from them. That was exciting for me,” Johnson — who is currently working on a third “Knives Out” movie for Netflix and a second season of the Peacock series “Poker Face” — told TheWrap.

“I think we’re definitely looking for voices and filmmakers that punch above their weight budgetarily and are open-minded to more popular storytelling,” T-Street producer Ben LeClair said. “One of the only rules at T-Street is that we never do anything down the middle.”

And “Fair Play,” a modern twist on the erotic thriller genre that tackles gender dynamics and sexual politics head-on, is anything but down the middle.

Dynevor and Ehrenreich play Emily and Luke, two bright, young professionals jockeying for career advancement at a vicious hedge fund in Manhattan, run by a gnomish Eddie Marsan. When the promotion Luke thinks he is going to get instead goes to Emily, the applecart is upended and the equilibrium of their relationship (intellectually, economically, sexually) becomes more and more fraught. This leads to one of the more unforgettable climaxes in recent memory, one that will have every couple who watches the movie arguing long after the credits have rolled.

With the Emerging Filmmaker Program, Bergman said the goal was to find first-time filmmakers with promise that they could guide through their debut feature and beyond.

“I just feel super grateful that for my first film, I got to make it with the right people and do it the right way. I feel like that rarely happens,” Domont said. “They understood the kind of movie I was making, and they were behind my vision from day one.”

Johnson was dazzled from the script stage. “If you read a script that’s written by somebody that has a solid storytelling sense, immediately you feel like you’re in good hands, you recognize it,” Johnson said.

In terms of making the movie, Bergman wanted to ensure that there were producers on each project from the incubator program “24/7, from the first day that we start working all the way until the movie comes out.” He said that oftentimes a producer is involved in development but not the production, or that they are flitting between different sets for different movies without being focused on one project all the way through. Johnson and Bergman would advise throughout but T-Street producers Leopold Hughes and LeClair were on hand for the whole process.

The shoot took place during the height of COVID-19 and in, of all places, Serbia (standing in for New York City) “in the heart of winter.” “That had its own challenges,” LeClair said.

Heating Up Sundance

At the time that Domont was making “Fair Play,” Johnson was working on “Glass Onion,” his follow-up to “Knives Out,” but was still clued into how “Fair Play” was turning out. “I just kept hearing reports that, wow, Chloe really is locked in and knows what she wants. And then when I saw the first cut, I think similar to reading the script, it’s just right there on the screen. I was just like, Oh, this is a filmmaker.”

There seems to be a kinship in Domont’s willingness to resurrect a genre that you don’t hear so much about these days, the erotic thriller, in the same way that Johnson brought back the whodunit mystery with “Knives Out.” Not that “Fair Play” is explicitly an erotic thriller.

“I set out to make a thriller about power dynamics within a relationship, it just so happens to be highly sexual,” Domont said. “There are definitely crossovers to the erotic thriller genre. There are crossovers to the psychological thriller genre or crossovers just to relationship drama. But I feel like our jobs as new filmmakers is to twist genre and manipulate it to service stories that we have to tell now. So I don’t think it’s a film that you can really put a particular label on or put in a box.”

For Domont, the trickiest aspect of the film wasn’t the sexual politics but maintaining the proper level of suspense. “I set out to make a pressure cooker kind of ticking time bomb thriller,” Domont said. She kept an eye on moments that “got too big too quickly” and adjusted.

“I’ve been calling it the date movie from hell. I’m ready to break some people up, I think.”

“Fair Play” writer/director Chloe Domont

Clearly, considering how the film played at Sundance, Domont found the right equilibrium.

“You have no idea how people are going to respond,” Bergman said of the anticipation ahead of the film’s festival premiere. “But we knew this woman is a real filmmaker. A serious filmmaker. And I had no doubt that people would recognize it.”

“It was almost like waiting for Christmas as a parent,” Johnson said. “Oh my God, I can’t wait for them see to see this amazing thing Chloe’s made.”

Domont said that the entire weekend was a “blur” but she does remember the very first time the movie played (the phrase “like gangbusters” comes to mind). “The best part for me was the audience reactions of that first screening. To have 350 people in a room gasp and cringe and woo and boo and feel the movie in a way that you always intended, I think is the best thing as a filmmaker,” Domont said.

When Netflix won the rights, Domont was taken with the platform’s “global reach.” The film received a limited theatrical release in October before its worldwide debut on the streaming platform.

“I want as many people to see this movie as possible because I think more people see it, the more conversations it’ll start,” Domont said. “I’m just excited to open this up globally and see what people from different cultures think, how they relate to it.”

“There’s a real sticky conversation there that really craves mass amplification,” LeClair added.

Much in the same way couples would go out to the theater to see “Fatal Attraction” or “Disclosure” on a Saturday night, they’ll spend a Saturday night at home watching “Fair Play.” And afterwards they might have an uncomfortable chat. “I’ve been calling it the date movie from hell,” Domont said. “I’m ready to break some people up, I think.”

More miraculous than the out-of-the-gate success of “Fair Play” was that T-Street did it again at another festival in the fall.

Another Winner

“American Fiction,” the feature directorial debut of Emmy-winning “Succession” and “Watchmen” writer Cord Jefferson, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival at the beginning of September. By the time the festival had wrapped, the movie, which stars a never-better Jeffrey Wright as persnickety college professor who deals with his very complicated family, had won the People’s Choice Award, a harbinger for awards season success to come (“Argo,” “American Beauty,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The King’s Speech” and “Nomadland” picked up the People’s Choice Award at Toronto before bringing home the Academy Award). MGM, now a part of the Amazon umbrella, will release the film theatrically this December.

Jefferson said he didn’t even known about the incubator program until he was in production. “We took out the script to various producers and the reason I decided to go with T-Street is because they greenlit the film in the meeting. I met with them and we chatted for about 15 or 20 minutes, and Ben LeClair said, ‘We want to make this movie.’ I immediately decided to go with them because they were the only ones who said, ‘We’re going to make this film,'” Jefferson said. “Then I found out afterwards that I was part of this program that they had with MRC. I think I was the third film.”

(If you’re wondering about the fuzzy math, the second film made after “Fair Play” in the program is “The Snack Shack” from director Adam Carter Rehmeier, expected to debut next year. LeClair called it “the best version of a nostalgic trip to Nebraska in 1991.”)

Part of why Jefferson didn’t know about the program until later is because he didn’t feel separate from everything else that was going on at T-Street.

“I think that sometimes when people establish these kinds of programs for new filmmaker voices or underrepresented voices, there’s a very clear delineation between sort of like, ‘This is us in a normal capacity, and then you’re over here in this kind of charitable space,’ and it feels like it’s very much separate but equal,” Jefferson said. “You never feel that at T-Street. It never felt like we were the JV and then these were our varsity projects. I never felt like my much smaller movie was any less important to anybody in the office, which was a really great feeling.”

Jefferson — whose esteemed writing resume also includes episodes of “The Good Place” and “Station Eleven” — was clear about his inexperience in directing, but that was far from a deterrent in T-Street’s eyes. “I think in fact it energized them. I think that they really do believe in their mission, which is to help people who might not otherwise get to make movies, make movies,” Jefferson said.

As for Bergman’s goal that filmmakers will make their first film with T-Street as part of this program and come back to make more, well, he doesn’t have to worry about that with Jefferson. “I’d work with T-Street on anything and everything for the rest of my career, as long as they’ll have me,” he said.

And it’s not like T-Street will only be making movies by first-time directors; Johnson said that they would welcome more established talents with bigger budgets. He genuinely loves, as he said before, “learning from watching other filmmakers work.”

There is also the matter of the third movie in the trilogy that began with “Knives Out” and continued with “Glass Onion.” Johnson joked that it was Bergman who had put me up to asking the question. “It’s coming along. I obviously couldn’t work during the strike, and now that it’s over, I’m diving in full force, and so it’s coming along. I’ve got the premise, I’ve got the setting, I’ve got what the movie is in my head. It’s just a matter of writing the damn thing,” Johnson said.

At one point, Johnson confessed that the name T-Street comes from a beach in San Clemente, where he would hang out as a teenager and where he would later shoot his debut feature “Brick” (the same movie that began his relationship with Bergman). “For me, it just evokes a place that I want to be and hang out with my friends at. You just meet me at T-Street and spend the whole day down there,” Johnson said.

The T-Street from Johnson’s youth has now become the T-Street of Johnson’s future – a nurturing place where he can make the very coolest things with the very coolest people.

Digital Cover Credits:

Photography by Jeff Vespa
Chloe Domont Hair & Makeup: Kerrie Urban
Stylist for Rian Johnson: Mark Holmes
Groomer for Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman: Su Naeem

The post ‘Fair Play’ on T-Street: How ‘The Date Movie From Hell’ Was Born | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

Director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell’s “Saw” offered a deceptively simple premise of two desperate men chained together in an empty room with little idea of how they got there or how to get out.  

Starring Cary Elwes and Danny Glover, Monica Potter and a pre-“Lost” Michael Emerson, “Saw” inspired a new wave of grindhouse horror, films that reveled in old-school gore and a certain Rube Goldberg mentality to the kills beyond just attractive teenagers being picked off one by one. 

Nine movies later, with over $1 billion at the global box office, “Saw” is still going strong. Thirteen years after the so-called “Final Chapter,” a tenth installment — aptly named “Saw X” — hits theaters this Friday.  

For whom the Bell tolls

“Saw X” producer Mark Burg, who has been with the series since the start, credits its longevity to one element. 

“It’s endured because we cast Tobin Bell in the first ‘Saw,’” Burg told TheWrap of the actor who would personify the diabolical killer, Jigsaw. The character, mostly hidden from view in the first picture, made his mark by placing flawed people into ghoulish traps during which they could save their lives but only through either self-harm or doing harm to others.  

Kevin Greutert edited the first five features of the series before directing the sixth and knocking it out of the park. He would also direct “Saw: The Final Chapter” and, now, “Saw X.” The filmmaker agrees that Bell’s almost accidental casting (he spends most of his very limited screentime in the first film in a hospital bed or, spoilers, lying dead on the floor of a scuzzy bathroom) was the magic that made “Saw” more than just a momentary success.  

Bell, a character actor previously known for bit parts as baddies in films like “The Firm” and shows like “24,” spent six days of filming lying on a floor just for a climactic shocker during which he stood up and explained that he was the mysterious villain known as Jigsaw. When “Saw” became a studio-defining hit for Lionsgate, earning $104 million worldwide on a $1 million budget, Jigsaw became a movie star. That meant the then-62-year-old Bell was one too. 

“He created such an iconic character with an elaborate code and a set of rules for what his character would and wouldn’t do,” Greutert explained to TheWrap for our “Saw” digital cover story, presented by Lionsgate. “We’ve put a lot of creative peoples’ imagination into realizing this world, including people like [production designer] Anthony Stabley who built the traps. It’s all tentacles coming out of Tobin Bell.”  

Not unlike the “Star Trek” film series, it was the first sequel that set the template for the overall franchise. “Saw II,” released the following October, a year after “Saw,” featured corrupt cop Donnie Wahlberg sitting across a table from a captured – but still in control – John Kramer (Jigsaw’s real name) while a group of strangers navigated a house of Jigsaw-created horrors.  

Greutert said “Saw II” showed that “Tobin Bell could carry a film. It also highlighted the series’ pinball continuity, the notion of several victims concurrently figuring out how to survive elaborate traps, a quasi-war between Jigsaw and the local police along with a mix of quick-kill booby traps and painful endurance tests.  

“Saw II” earned $152 million worldwide on a $5 million budget, solidifying Jigsaw as the biggest Hollywood boogeyman since Ghostface from the “Scream” movies. A year later, “Saw III” did the unthinkable and killed off both Kramer and fan-favorite apprentice Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith). Impressively, both anti-heroes have remained dead in the franchise continuity.  

“You think it’s over just because I am dead, but the games have just begun.” 

The events of “Saw IV” introduced a new apprentice in the form of Detective Lieutenant Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). It also took place concurrently with the onscreen events of “Saw III,” introducing a new staple of the franchise: unreliable continuity. Sequels would twist backwards in time, taking place between prior installments, and “Saw VI” used flashbacks and past-tense exposition to keep Tobin Bell front-and-center in a deeply personal A-plot.

The “Saw” franchise was the unchallenged king of Halloween until another outta nowhere indie breakout, the home movie ghost story “Paranormal Activity,” became a blockbuster in October of 2009. One year later, a 3-D boost and the return of Cary Elwes set the stage for a “Saw” series finale. 

On why the seventh film, also titled “Saw 3-D,” didn’t quite click with fans, Koules offered a brief explanation: “We tried to do a movie where we do a million close and fast in-your-face shots in 3-D. That is the opposite of what you want in that format. We tried to fit a square peg in a round hole.” 

A new kind of sequel

Since “Saw: The Final Chapter” failed to live up to its title, Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures have since thrice resurrected the franchise. The Spierig Brothers directed “Jigsaw” in 2017, a relatively straightforward installment that took place before and after the previous films. Chris Rock’s self-professed fandom of the series got him put in charge of 2021’s “Spiral: From the Book of Saw,” which starred Rock and Samuel L. Jackson. Darren Lynn Bousman would return to the director’s chair after helming the first three sequels.  

Neither were breakout hits, but both have their fans. Besides, when your franchise averages a budget of around $10 million each you can afford to keep rolling the dice. Which brings us to “Saw X.”

The tenth installment is pitched as a “Saw” for general audiences and a love letter to those who never stopped playing Jigsaw’s games. It’s a sequel to “Saw” and a prequel to “Saw II.” The dying John Kramer shells out for an experimental cancer treatment only to realize that he’s been conned. Spoiler: Johnny K takes issue with being scammed and much blood is shed in an extended act of righteous retribution. 

The film makes a point to recreate the look and feel of the first few “Saw” films. It eschews the digital aesthetic of “Saw 3-D” and the “not your average ‘Saw’ movie” palette of the previous entries. It’s an old-school “Saw,” with Bell taking center stage for the first time since “Saw IV” in 2007.

Koules and Burg both agreed that the goals with “Saw X” were two-fold. First, it is a self-contained “Saw” film that will make sense to those who never got into the series or left after the first sequel or two. It takes place in Mexico, the first time an installment has had a specific location and occurs over a specific period, sans flashbacks or retcons. Second, it’s positioned as an acting showcase for its top-billed star. In the first act, Bell gets to be a friendly older engineer desperate to survive his grim cancer diagnosis and spends the first act or so not as Jigsaw but as regular old John Kramer.    

Game (not remotely) over

Greutert argued that the new film deals with the Trump-era notion that “it’s become more OK in the minds of a lot of people that they can publicly lie. They know that even if the majority won’t believe them, core members of the citizenry will. That’s corrosive to society.”  

Moreover, if this film is a success, there now exists an in-continuity way to make “Saw” films starring Kramer. As Burg explained, actors who have died in the “Saw” movies can still pop up in future installments.  

Burg declared that “as long as Tobin [Bell] wants to continue, as long as the audience goes to see them, we’ll be happy to make them.” 

Koules echoed that sentiment, stating “We’re going to keep doing them until people stop showing up.” 

Greutert and Stabley promised not to partake in “a science fiction gimmick with cloning or a supernatural gimmick with ghosts,” and they both firmly promised that “Jigsaw will never go into space.” 

To be fair, the director acknowledged that promises are made to be broken.  

“George Lucas once said, ‘I promise you all I’ll do a lot of things for money. But I won’t sell sugary cereals to kids.’ I have some Yoda cereal in my kitchen that proves the lie,” he said.

If it’s Halloween, it must be “Saw”

Those first seven films were released in late October, seven years in a row, from 2004 to 2010. They represent a still-unprecedented achievement in lightning-fast production and hitting that seasonal release date. And the overall esteem of the series has only risen within the horror community.  

“There’s such a huge fan base,” declared Stabley. “Audiences say to themselves ‘Could I survive this trap? What would I do?’ There’s also, with all horror films, this feeling of catharsis. You step out of the theater and you’re like, ‘My life is not too bad.” 

Or, as a prophet once spoke nearly 20 years ago, “Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you, not anymore.” 

The post ‘Saw’ Filmmakers on 20 Years of Games, Twisty Timelines and Tobin Bell | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

In 1988, director John Waters debuted his wacky, irreverent quasi-musical “Hairspray” in theaters. The story of Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), a young Baltimore teen desperate to become a star on the Corny Collins show, went on to gross over $8 million at the box office that year on a $2.7 million budget, garnering six Independent Spirit Award nominations and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It also marked the mainstream explosion of Waters, whose campy spirit connected with audiences at large as “Hairspray” has since become a bona fide fan favorite, with a long-running Broadway show that was also adapted into a true movie musical in 2007.

Waters, who has gone on to make other cult classics including “Serial Mom” and “Polyester,” attributes the film’s success to not talking down to its audience, no matter how misguided they might be. “It’s a political movie without anyone preaching,” Waters told TheWrap for a digital cover story in celebration of not just the 35th anniversary but a retrospective and exhibition of his films at the Academy Museum as well as the unveiling of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “It’s not ‘woke fat girl goes on a dance show,’ even though that is what it is.”

“I built a career on bad reviews.”

John Waters

The director had no idea the movie would be a success while he was making it. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen with it,” he said. “It felt good… I felt the joy on the set.”

For Waters, the movie works because it kills hatred with kindness or, in this case, laughter. “You want people to agree with you? Make them laugh. They’ll listen.” Even those who might not immediately think a movie about a heavy-set girl with a a drag performer in a lead role is for them have come to celebrate the movie.

“Racists like ‘Hairspray,'” said Waters. “But they’re so stupid they don’t realize it’s making fun of them. That means I won the first round of debates.”

“Hairspray” was an autobiographical film of sorts for Waters, who based much of it on his own experiences growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s and his time on “The Buddy Deane Show,” a local take on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.” As Waters explained it, Deane and WBZ-TV allowed its teenage dance stars to be more outlandish than Dick Clark, with tighter pants and higher hair.

“These kids were huge stars in Baltimore,” he said. “But they got beat up when they went out because they were hated or loved depending on if you were in a working class neighborhood or a fancy neighborhood.”

Waters, who grew up in a middle class suburban neighborhood evolving around the Civil Rights Movement, said going downtown exposed to a world that was not accepted. “Around that time Governor [George] Wallace, the racist governor, was running in the primary in Baltimore and I went to the demonstrations,” Waters said. “It was the first time I ever felt civil disobedience… We went downtown to be beatniks, and we met the gay world and we all hung around together.”

“[He] pulled me aside, sat me down and said, ‘I want to tell you your life is about to change,’”

Ricki Lake

Despite the satirical subject matter, Waters remained shocked that the movie only earned a PG rating. He said even the film’s distributor, New Line, was surprised it received such a tame rating considering the use of the word “shit” which tended to elevate movies to PG-13 status. “But it is a movie the whole family should be able to see,” said Waters. “It is a movie that encourages interracial dating, two men sing a love song to each other in it.”

He praises actress Ricki Lake for making her own outsider character, Tracy Turnblad, into an icon for heavier set young girls. As he explained it, it was a challenge trying to find a young woman who was heavy to play the character. That wasn’t a problem when they did a live version of the Broadway show on NBC in 2016. “When it finally was on NBC, four versions later, and they had an open audition, thousands of big girls were in line to audition,” he said. “That’s because Ricki made it great… she was Tracy Turnblad in some ways, completely.”

“I stood for the underdog,” Lake told TheWrap. And while Waters might not have known the film was going to be something special, Lake — who parlayed the film’s success into striking off on her own as an actress, documentarian and talk show host — explained that Waters prepared her for the impact the film would have on everyone. “[He] pulled me aside, sat me down and said, ‘I want to tell you your life is about to change,'” Lake said. “[He said] ‘I want you to remember three things: Always stay humble. Always stay true to yourself. And if you gonna read and believe the good things people say about you, you have to read and believe the bad.'”

That’s because, according to Waters, “I built a career on bad reviews.”

Waters also had to discuss his regular collaborator, Divine, who starred in six of the director’s features. He said he’d initially planned for Divine to play both Tracy and Tracy’s mother, kind of like “The Parent Trap,” but he was overruled.

“Divine, for the first time got great reviews, because he had established himself as this thing that we made up to scare hippies, basically like Godzilla meets Elizabeth Taylor,” he said. “Divine was used to being the star and Ricki had the biggest part in it,” though the pair became close friends during filming. Tragically, Divine died in his sleep on March 7, 1988, three weeks after “Hairspray” opened nationwide. He received a posthumous Independent Spirit Award nomination for his dual roles in the film.

Looking back, Waters considers his quirky tale of an outcast looking for acceptance on the dance floor of a local television station the “happiest experience” of his career. “Reliving my childhood,” he said, “was a great moment of my life, and I think the joy of making [“Hairspray”] came through.”

You can watch TheWrap’s full video interviews above. “John Waters: Pope of Trash” debuts at the Academy Museum September 17.

The post John Waters Celebrates ‘Hairspray’ at 35: ‘Racists Like It, but They Don’t Realize It’s Making Fun of Them’ | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.

With Gadot’s new Netflix movie, the actress and producer on the project wanted to do more. “I grew up watching ‘Bond,’ and ‘Mission: [Impossible],’ and ‘Bourne Identity’ and ‘Die Hard,'” Gadot told TheWrap in an interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike. “I love these movies. I love the action, and the twists and turns and drama, the scope. I want to make movies that the audience can come in and we can take them through a journey for two hours, and make them feel at the end of it as if they went through a grand tour around the world and went through a rollercoaster of emotion.”

After the massive box office success of “Wonder Woman” in 2017 (the film grossed $412.6 million in the United States alone), Gadot saw the opportunity to craft a potential franchise of her own from scratch. “I had an aha moment,” she said. “I was like, ‘Wait a second. Men go to see these films. There’s more space, more room for female-led action films.'”

Rachel Stone is also a different character for Gadot, who has often played warm-hearted characters with a deep empathy for people. Here, Stone is a lonely individual acting as a dual agent for both MI6 and a shadowy global peacekeeping agency. “She’s a woman of many contradictions,” Gadot said. “I felt like the plot was clashing with the character, which is always a good thing in a movie. I played her as someone who really wants [to] but just can’t have connections.”

But because she’s completely an original character, that required Gadot and screenwriters Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder to dive deep into who the character was. “It’s not like Rachel Stone is based on a comic book or an IP or on a series of books,” Gadot said. “We had to really establish everything from the ground up.” The actress emphasized she wanted immense set pieces, but grounded, layered characters who could inject pathos alongside the explosions.

During TheWrap’s cover story interview, Gadot and costar Alia Bhatt went on to discuss the struggles of filming a globe-trotting action franchise and why they don’t buy into the stigma that female-led action movies aren’t successful.

Alia, what was the pitch for you to join this movie?
Alia Bhatt: I don’t think there was much pitching needed. It was this action film with Gal Gadot in the lead, also producing, [a] very good part, etc, etc. OK! Let’s read the script. Let’s start the movie. I met with Tom [Harper], our director on Zoom, and we just completely hit it off.

One of the first things I remember discussing with him is the importance of emotion in an action film, because sometimes I feel like the action films [don’t] necessarily land the characters and the emotions as well. I don’t want to just do a big film just for the heck of it. It’s so important to get that balance and he resonated with all of that.

Gal, were there any specific requirements for you in what you wanted in a costar?
GG: I was looking for somebody who is multilayered and talented. For somebody to not be an obvious choice. I saw “Gangubai” and I just fell in love with Alia’s talent. She was our first go-to; she was everyone’s first choice and we’re so happy that we got her.

Gal, can you talk about playing this character differently compared to Wonder Woman or even Gisele in “Fast and Furious?
GG: I don’t want to repeat myself. I want to do something different. Every new movie I make and explore different characters. This one is just so grounded, and gritty and raw. The tone is different than any of the other movies I’ve ever done. And it’s also about working with different filmmakers. They are the ones that are holding the compass to the vision. And Tom [Harper] is someone I was really passionate to work with.

It’s funny, it’s not because of “The Aeronauts,” he really impressed me with a small indie movie that he did with Jessie Buckley called “Wild Rose.” I saw the movie and I was thinking, “Wow, that’s going to be so interesting to bring a filmmaker [who] is character driven into an action film.” We knew that we were going to have an incredible second unit director. We knew we were going to have incredible teams all around. What I cared about was the heart, the flash of the movie, of the characters, and I felt like bringing someone like Tom would make them shine.

Alia, this is your American debut. What’s been the challenge approaching a movie like this compared to your work in India?
AB: I’m not sure if there was anything challenging. Culturally, yes, there are differences and that’s welcome differences, just in terms of pace and timing and work hours. That’s why I came into this completely raw, just by myself. I have my people, my technical team, hair, makeup, all of that in India, and I’m comfortable with them; I’ve been working with them for 10 years. Here I am on a set just by myself with me and my belongings, nothing else. So that was quite refreshing for me to experience that after working for 10 years in an industry and made me feel very empowered that I was able to go on this experience. But in terms of filmmaking, it’s the same.

GG: She’s so humble. She was pregnant. She did everything while carrying a baby. It was phenomenal to watch. We were traveling the world. She traveled the world with us, early calls, late nights, overtime. She did everything. It was remarkable.

Was there a sequence that you filmed for this that still haunts you in terms of difficulty?
GG: We filmed in the south of Portugal, there’s a desert there. And we filmed [at] like 3:30 a.m., 4 a.m. We filmed at like a funny hour when the sun is just starting to shine, but it’s not yet. I’ve never eaten so much sand in my entire life. I had sand everywhere, literally. That was the lovely thing about filming in so many locations. On the one hand, it’s gorgeous. It’s beautiful. Iceland, Italy, the Alps, Portugal, Morocco, all these places. But you deal with [a] real climate. It was so damp. It was so wet. We had sand everywhere. We couldn’t open our eyes, it was that bad. So if I have to choose one for the both of us, I would choose this one.

Do you think the stigma about women-led action films not being successful is still omnipresent?
GG: I don’t know if I want to believe the stigma because the reason why I had a belief that this could be super successful was only after the success we experienced with “Wonder Woman.” So, no, I think as long as the story is good it has great potential to be a huge success.

AB: It’s the story that matters and the gender is secondary. It’s a question I have answered a lot, even in India and in the Indian film industry. I’ve led a lot of my films and they have also been commercially successful at the box office and the question still comes up because it’s still surprising. We need to reach that point where the element of surprise doesn’t exist. They should just be movies.

I always say, “Would you ask a man this question?” I remember it came my way a lot when I was pregnant. I got this question a lot like, “What do you have to say about having a baby at the peak of your career?” And I said, “Would you ask the same question to my husband because he’s also at the peak of his career?” There was no answer. For some reason, even when women do it repeatedly we’re still asked the question, so we need to just lead by example and eliminate the question.

“Heart of Stone” streams on Netflix August 11.

The post Gal Gadot Wanted to See More Women in Action Movies, So She Made Her Own | Digital Cover appeared first on TheWrap.