“It’s just amazing and really humbling,” Preston said. “I didn’t expect it at this point. I’ve had an incredible career that I’m very grateful for. I wasn’t pining for it, but the fact that it has happened at this point in my life makes me appreciate it
more. When you have decades of being on set and being a part of this business, you have a deeper, bigger perspective on the whole thing. It is quite humbling.” 

The series, an extension of Michelle King and Robert King’s “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” universe, transplants the character from Chicago to New York, where she is on a special assignment to shadow the NYPD.

Elsbeth’s new boss, Captain C.W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), doesn’t know what to make of this garishly dressed outsider, nor do the disapproving detectives whom she eventually shows up in case after case. The “howdunit” drama has been a hit with audiences; the Season 1 finale drew more viewers than the finale of ABC’s wildly popular “9-1-1” the same night. Preston has a theory about why Elsbeth is connecting. 

“It harkens back to Columbo, Sherlock Holmes or even ‘Murder, She Wrote’ tonally,” she said. “But it’s fresh and new as well because we don’t expect a character like Elsbeth to be at the center of a show like that. This is a woman who’s taken herself out of one world and put herself in another, a fish-out-of-water situation. It’s like a circus has dropped down in a police procedural.”

Elsbeth’s colorful, radically off-trend wardrobe is a trademark of the character. (She even inspires her own haute couture fashion line in the season finale.) Her clothing functions as a cloak that gives cops and culprits a false sense of superiority over her. Much like her ostensibly diffident demeanor, the clothes invite people to underestimate her at their own peril.

“People see it as silly or something not to be taken seriously,” she said with a smile. “She can then really turn on them and show her — pun intended — true colors. They don’t see her coming.”

The character’s signature look, which includes bold tones and patterns and maybe a few bows, almost got a makeover for the series. At first, costume designer Dan Lawson, who has always dressed Elsbeth, wanted to make her more of a
traditional leading lady by giving her a more elegant silhouette now that she’s in New York. But the Kings vetoed that, saying, as Preston explained, “‘Absolutely not. We want her to stay exactly the way she is.’”

Part of keeping Elsbeth the same was making sure her often annoying tendency to pry was undimmed. “She knows that she is odd and that can be disconcerting to people,” Preston said. “She is unapologetic in her zeal and her vulnerability and
her flaws and her genius. She doesn’t try to hide it. That’s inspiring.”

The character becomes a friend and a mentor to younger police officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), one of the few on the force to recognize Elsbeth’s abilities. She’s game to help Elsbeth act out potential murder scenarios, an example of her unorthodox investigation methods.

Like “Columbo,” the juiciest role in each episode is the killer, and in the first season, everyone from Jesse Tyler Ferguson to Blair Underwood turned up to bump people off. At times, we even find ourselves rooting for the villain—like Gina Gershon’s diva-esque plastic surgeon or André De Shields sophisticated fashion icon—to get away with it.

For Preston, the caliber of the guest actors “Elsbeth” is attracting has everything to do with the quality of the show’s scripts. “These characters are so fully drawn and we get to do these long dialogue scenes that you just don’t get to do that much on television,” she said. “We’re doing these six, seven pages of dialogue. They get trimmed in the edit, but for us, as actors, it looks like we’re doing a little play each week.”

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Carrie Preston Says ‘Elsbeth’ Success Is ‘Really Humbling’: ‘I Didn’t Expect It at This Point’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Hiddleston responded by quoting from “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Wright and Martin paused and asked him what he meant by that, and Hiddleston replied, “I don’t know. I think we just have to bring it full circle. There has to be some sort of poetic catharsis and redemption to this long journey of struggle and pain and self-discovery. Let’s aim for that.”

And that’s what they did.

In the second (and seemingly final) season of “Loki,” Hiddleston’s God of Mischief finds redemption. But not in the way you might expect. This is a character who, among other things, led the Battle of New York against the Avengers, attempted to kill his brother Thor multiple times and, in Loki’s inaugural season, threw the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe into chaos by monkeying with the various timelines that constitute the multiverse.

This season, he travels to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and teams up with a benevolent variant of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), the timekeeper who Loki bested at the end of Season 1. He makes friends, loses them and hops around timelines and multiverses. At the end, he takes responsibility for himself and the timelines he was so desperate to save to ensure the safety of his friends.

This is the most layered version of Loki, whom Hiddleston has been playing since “Thor” in 2011, and the perfect sendoff for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most beloved bad guy. It’s playful and poetic, moving and eye-popping. And it could also earn Hiddleston his first Emmy nomination since “The Night Manager” back in 2016.

Hiddleston calls playing Loki “the great surprise and delight of my whole life.” He was first cast in 2009, when he was 28 years old. “I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to play this complex, deep, ancient, elevated character that represents playfulness, spontaneity, unpredictability,” Hiddleston said. “What a sandbox to play in.” But he didn’t think he’d be playing the character 15 years later. 

“The great surprise for me is that it’s been a joy every time,” he said. “It’s never felt like the same job. It’s always felt new. It’s always felt inspiring for different reasons — different actors, different stories, different themes. And yet all the way through a depth and a range of feeling.”

For the second season of the series, Hiddleston thought a lot about that Eliot quote. “What does that mean for Loki?” he said. “What would it mean for Loki to arrive where he started and know they thought back to Loki’s first appearance in Thor. It starts with a scene of Loki and Thor as children. Their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) says to them, “Only one of you will ascend to the throne, but you were both born to be kings.” (Spoiler alert!) Loki does inherit a throne at the end of Season 2, but it comes in a “shape he would never have known and would never have recognized,” Hiddleston said. 

When the team was working on season 2, Hiddleston wrote “glorious purpose” on a whiteboard in the writers room. It was a callback to the first Avengers movie, when Loki tells Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that he is “burdened with glorious purpose.” 

“The glorious purpose he always wanted has no glory in it. It has only burden,” Hiddleston said. “He would finally end up in a position of responsibility and in a position of belonging. But he would be alone in his belonging.” That, Hiddleston said, was a jumping-off point and would guide the show to its conclusion. Martin told him, “The first season is Loki learning how to love and the second season should be Loki learning how to lead.”

“We’re given this extraordinary privilege and opportunity to create fiction,” the actor said. “But you want the fiction to resonate for people in their souls and in their lives.” In other words: glorious purpose, fulfilled.

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How Tom Hiddleston Fulfilled His ‘Glorious Purpose’ With ‘Loki’ Season 2 appeared first on TheWrap.

“I’ve spent a long time being in rooms pitching very left-turn sequels for preexisting IP and movies and TV shows,” the writer-producer told TheWrap. “And usually, people are like, ‘No, that’s too bold. Can you just do something much simpler?’ And then they don’t hire me.”

But in the case of Netflix series “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” Grabinski found a kindred spirit in Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the original “Scott Pilgrim” comic book series, which was adapted into a live-action movie directed by Edgar Wright in 2010.

For inspiration, Grabinski and O’Malley watched every episode of David Lynch’s brilliant if polarizing 2018 return to his cult television series “Twin Peaks,” as well as movies like “Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time,” “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” and “Ocean’s Twelve.” “We both respond to big swings. ‘Scott Pilgrim’ was a big swing. And I think what we realized was we wanted to have something that felt as shocking as the first time you read ‘Scott’ or the first time you saw the movie,” Grabinski said.

Together, the duo asked themselves: How do we make a new “Scott Pilgrim” series not normal?

The answer was to take familiar elements of the comic book and the movie, namely the characters of Scott Pilgrim (voiced by Michael Cera, reprising his role) and Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, ditto) and inverse the action. Instead of following a subtly toxic man in his 20s who faces down the “evil exes” of his current girlfriend, what if he died during the first fight, leaving it to Ramona to sort out the relationships and trauma from her past? Only, you know, funny. Almost everything you expect or remember from earlier incarnations of “Scott Pilgrim” has been flipped on its head.

The idea to make Ramona the main character (and for one of her exes, voiced by Chris Evans, to play Scott Pilgrim in a movie version of the guy’s life) came about organically when Grabinski and O’Malley were discussing story. “Instead of saying, ‘That is stupid, don’t do it,’ he said, ‘Oh, I love that,’” Grabinski recalled. “And then we started mocking [it up] and it went from just being us goofing around to, within a matter of days, a formal thing.”

For O’Malley, this subversion of expectations harkens back to the graphic novel, whose “first readers just were expecting a straightforward, slice-of-life, indie-rock thing, and then it becomes this goofy video game comedy,” he said. “I wanted to pull the rug out. I’ve always loved doing that kind of thing, and we had this audience that was potentially going to watch a show. It’s like, how much fun can we possibly have here?”

Radical alterations sometimes end with fans feeling betrayed. There are still debates raging over “Twin Peaks.” And don’t get anyone started on “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” But there was none of that with “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.” Critics liked it and audiences tuned in. 

“We didn’t expect awards attention. But the chatter alone [was satisfying],” O’Malley shared. “Everything gets dragged into a culture war now and fortunately, we seem to have dodged most of those bullets. People enjoy the twists and the fun and were along for the ride. That’s all we wanted.”

Grabinski agreed: “I was thinking about the audience every single second of it, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be correct. In my gut, I felt like people would understand that this came from a place of enthusiasm and love for the world of ‘Scott Pilgrim’ and not us taking the piss out of it. But there was always a chance that people were going to revolt and think that we were jerks and we were just being trolls. And, you know, sometimes we are, but the macro story of this is something that came from a place of love.”

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Creators Explain Their ‘Shocking’ Decision to Change the Plot Entirely appeared first on TheWrap.

“I’m so happy,” he said. “I’m proud of our team.”

“Shōgun” is the second miniseries to be adapted from the James Clavell book of the same name, following NBC’s Emmy-winning 1980 version starring Richard Chamberlain. The new series begins in 1600, when an English seafaring pilot named John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) lands in feudal Japan.

Initially, Blackthorne plans to make the Japanese his allies and recruit them into England’s war against the Portuguese. But the more time he spends in this new country, the more he gets sucked into the political maneuvering of Lord Toranaga (Sanada) as he plots against the ruling regents, and the more he falls for his translator, Lady Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai).

Whereas the first “Shōgun” adaptation was praised in the United States but met with mixed reactions in Japan, the reception for FX’s new epic has been warm in both countries. In its first six days of streaming, the first episode racked up 9 million views globally, making it the No. 1 scripted series in the world and the biggest debut ever for FX.

The 10-episode show has also pushed Sanada, a celebrated actor, producer and martial artist in Japan who has appeared in several U.S. productions over the past 20-plus years (including “The Last Samurai,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “John Wick: Chapter 4”) to the very center of the Hollywood spotlight. The same is true for Anna Sawai, whose previous projects include “F9” and “Pachinko.”

“It’s been so surreal. I don’t know how everyone was feeling about it, but I was not expecting it to be this talked about,” said Sawai, who was particularly surprised by the way American audiences have embraced a series that is 70% in subtitled Japanese. Still, the most gratifying reaction has come from Japan, the country where she spent much of her childhood.

“That means a lot to me because I know the feeling of being Japanese and watching Western productions make a Japanese-themed project and being like, ‘It’s not really authentic or accurate,’ or ‘It doesn’t feel real to me,’” she said. “But this one, people see their own culture being reflected in a very accurate way. It’s been amazing.”

Credit for that authenticity goes in no small part to Sanada, who was on set every day, working closely with showrunners Marks and Kondo and the largely Japanese crew, plus the Japanese artists who collaborated with every single department, from stunts to hair and makeup.

“I checked everything — decoration, props, costumes. Fixed them,” he said. He followed the Japanese translation of the script through its elevation into poetic, 17th-century parlance by the Kyoto-based playwright Kiyoko Moriaki. He watched rehearsals and offered actors and directors suggestions before putting on Toranaga’s armor and performing his own scenes. “It does require collaboration and creation,” Sanada said. “It was like a dream.”

For Sanada, the success of “Shōgun” comes at just the right time in Japan, breathing new life into jidaigeki, a type of historical drama that he said has been lagging in recent years. He has signed on to exec produce and resume his role as Toranaga for two more seasons, though a start date for Season 2 production has not yet been announced. Beyond “Shōgun,” he’d be game to work on other historical stories, specifically those about Kabuki and Noh theater. “If the story includes our culture, a historical thing, maybe I want to produce as well. But if not, I want to enjoy acting.” 

He’s open to where that might take place — in Japan, in the U.S. (he’s currently based in Los Angeles), somewhere else — and what the roles would look like. “[I want to do] whatever I’ve never done before,” he said. “Changing the image is also good. [It’s] refreshing for myself, refreshing for the audience.”

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post For Anna Sawai and Hiroyuki Sanada, the Success of ‘Shōgun’ Is ‘So Surreal’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“In a world that is very chaotic and, frankly, terrifying — some days the news is very bleak — we feel at times in this country powerless,” she said. “To have a show where a problem gets created and then 15 minutes later it’s resolved, it’s pretty comforting. And to have that comfort cloaked in gorgeous, very detailed costumes, Emmy-winning production design and a Broadway bingo [cast of actors], that’s just icing on the cake. Sometimes, you just need entertainment for entertainment’s sake.”

The brainchild of “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, “The Gilded Age” unfolds like a beautiful, big-budget period soap opera populated with capital-A actors. It delves into the culture clash between old-money New Yorkers like Christine Baranski’s Agnes Van Rhijn and upstarts like their neighbors the Russells, whose patriarch George (Morgan Spector) is a railroad tycoon.

We also get a glimpse into the lives of wealthy Black families like that of Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), who wants to be independent of her parents (Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson) to make her way in the world as a journalist.  

For Bertha, her only objective in life is to gain acceptance into high society, and in Season 2, the battle of the rich plays out via dueling opera houses. In the end, Bertha’s new creation, the Metropolitan Opera, prevails over the old society Academy of Music. Playing such a shrewd operator has been fun for Coon. “She’s sort of the bad guy,” she said. “People hate her. It’s glorious to play the character who wins at the end. Who doesn’t like to win? I love to win.” 

Bertha’s determination is bolstered by her strong marriage. So in Season 2, when she and George clash over information he failed to share, we see a different side of Bertha. “I’ve learned how powerful her vulnerability is,” Coon said. “We don’t see it very often; she’s quite tough. She has a break from George and so we see her not having a place to go with her vulnerability and feeling at loose ends. Any villain — if she is in fact a villain; she is a greedy capitalist if nothing else — is certainly more interesting for having that complication.”

A key component to Bertha’s master plan is to marry off her daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) to a rich suitor, regardless of whether or not he brings love to the union. “She thinks she knows what’s best for her daughter and she thinks her daughter has no idea what she needs,” Coon said. “She certainly thinks her husband doesn’t have any idea what her daughter needs. She doesn’t believe that Gladys is necessarily equal to the task before her, which is making a good match, securing the family fortune and setting up her own children for the future. Bertha’s doing it out of love. It’s just flawed. We do a lot of things for love that are not necessarily good for the people we love.”

So far, Bertha has only rarely crossed paths with the formidable Agnes and her meek sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon). “I would love, love, love to work with Cynthia and Christine,” Coon said. “I never get to work with them and I doubt I will. I just think their worlds are not going to collide.”

We will see, however, the continuing bitter rivalry between Bertha and her former lady’s maid Enid Turner (Kelley Curran), who tried to seduce George in Season 1 and now, married to a tycoon of her own, is on equal social standing as Mrs. Russell. “She’s a tremendous foe; she’s totally unhinged and she has, it seems like, no moral bottom,” Coon said. “I think the thing about Turner that is so terrifying for Bertha is that what she’s accomplished is incredibly impressive. She really was washing my underwear and suddenly she’s being entertained in my house. That is an astonishing leap in any circumstance. Their ambition is very similar.” 

In that case, maybe they won’t remain foes forever? “It might be interesting,” Coon said, “to see what would happen if Bertha and [Enid] teamed up.”

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Carrie Coon Loves Playing ‘Sort of the Bad Guy’ on ‘The Gilded Age’ appeared first on TheWrap.

For Debicki, who earned her first Emmy nomination for her Season 5 performance as “the people’s princess,” knowing Diana’s endpoint led to a deliberate decision to subvert viewers’ expectations of what was to come. “I
understood very well where the character was going and I understood what the audience already knows,” the 33-year-old Australian actress said. “We all expect something [to happen], so how do I create something that’s perhaps less expected? And create room for surprise or space for the audience to experience something new?” 

That meant switching her approach.

The knowledge base she established while preparing for Season 5 allowed Debicki the confidence and freedom to take more creative chances in her second go at playing Diana. “I stopped thinking by the time I got to Season 6,” she said. “I trusted myself. I actively let myself discover things, and I was comfortable enough in the skin of the thing that I felt I could push it in different directions and see what worked. You’ve worked hard to lay the foundations for yourself so you can be braver.”

Debicki singled out “all the stuff with the paparazzi” as challenges to film because of what happens next, but it’s a quieter scene creator Peter Morgan wrote — where Diana and boyfriend Dodi Fayed (played by Khalid Abdalla) attempt to dine at the hotel restaurant hours before their deaths — that proved to be more emotionally taxing.

“The idea of desperately wanting a bit of peace and quiet in a restaurant and not be able to have the luxury of boundaried space and privacy — I remember that being a very, very sad place to be in,” Debicki said.

While Diana’s death casts a long shadow over the first half of Season 6, many of Debicki’s most joyous moments involved scenes with Diana’s young sons, William and Harry (played by Ed McVey and Luther Ford), where she enjoyed her happiest times. It added a liveliness to an otherwise burdened season.

“I’m proud of the scene where it’s me and the two boys, and they’re packing up to leave to go to Balmoral,” Debicki said of an Episode 3 scene that was shot very quickly. “I remember watching that in ADR and I thought, That’s really good. We did a good job. It’s just a lot of love there, you know?” Charting Diana and Dodi’s romance was also a highlight: “These two people landed in a place of grace with one another and there was real love and compassion, real humanity.”  

“The Crown” doesn’t pretend to be an official record of the royal family, though it’s hard not to make comparisons to real life. One of the drama’s most controversial creative liberties came in the form of Diana’s ghost in the fourth
episode. In the scene, Diana has a surprising heart-to-heart with her estranged ex-husband, Prince Charles (Dominic West), on a plane following her death. The “grief scene” is one of Debicki’s favorites, though she was initially apprehensive about how they were going to pull it off. 

“When I found out there was this [controversy] happening around it, I completely understood it because when I read it first in the script, I thought, What is that? How do you do that? What does that mean? Does she look like a person?” she said. “When we came to do that scene, we didn’t rehearse it. We just ran the cameras and it was very honest work. It was a very sad scene to shoot.”

After she took a beat to reflect on her body of work as Diana, Debicki concluded, “I guess I’m proud of a lot of it.”

By the end of filming, though, it was time to let Diana go. “I was ready to leave the part when I felt I finished the story I intended to tell,” she said. “So that was a peaceful thing. I knew I had done my best with that [role].”

“It was very challenging to shoot. Acting is a very physical job and things manifest in ways where it takes time to heal from them. Whether you’re physically tired or your body’s experienced an emotional landscape that’s not its own, that stuff takes time to work its way out of your system. [It] took a long time for me to come back to myself.”

Even so, playing Diana was a rare opportunity, Debicki said — like “lightning in a bottle.”

“I learned a lot, probably more than any other role I’ve ever done,” she said. “I was very, very lucky to play her. I can’t imagine anything will ever come close to it. I feel immensely grateful that I got asked to do this part — it was a big chunk of my life, nearly three years — and an extraordinary thing that came into my life. And I never saw it coming.”

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Drama Series issue here.

The post Elizabeth Debicki Says Portraying Diana’s Final Days on ‘The Crown’ Meant Creating ‘Room for Surprise’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“The Morning Show,” then, would seem a somewhat unlikely arena for the actress to showcase such authenticity. The starry Apple TV+ series is as much a primetime soap as it is prestige viewing: Reese Witherspoon in space! Jennifer Aniston in Italy! Steve Carell … dead! But Beharie, who won Best Actress at the 2021 Gotham Awards for the indie film “Miss Juneteenth” and joined “The Morning Show” in Season 3 as Olympian-turned-news anchor Chris Hunter, said that was part of the appeal. 

“I knew that she was coming to the season with sort of a different energy,” Beharie said. “I spoke to [director] Mimi Leder after my first tape, and she was just so excited about what Chris could introduce to the show, but also what she stood for, in a way. There was no one else like her so far.” In the role, Beharie delivers a forthright, grounded performance that stands in contrast to many of the series’ more over-the-top, soapy performances. (Here’s looking at you, Billy Crudup.) It even stands out from the A-list regular cast as well as fellow Season 3 newcomers Jon Hamm and Tig Notaro.

When Chris is first introduced, she exudes positivity and confidence. “Initially, I was just having a lot of fun,” Beharie said. “She was, you know, teasing Alex [Aniston’s character] about the whole astronaut thing and going to space. And I hadn’t had the opportunity to play such a bright, colorful and sort of warm character in a while. And so I was looking forward to doing that. But then it took a bit of a turn.”

That first “super juicy” turn came in Episode 3, titled “White Noise,” when Chris and network board chairperson Cybil Richards (Holland Taylor) sit down for a live, on-air interview after a data breach reveals that Richards made racist comments about Chris’ hiring, calling her “Aunt Jemima.” In the tense five-and-a-half-minute standoff, Beharie slowly reveals that there is much more to her character than just being the morning show’s upbeat newcomer. Chris asks Cybill to account for her comments, maintaining a perfect calm even when it’s clear she sees through the exec’s platitudes. When Cybil says, “Anyone who sits in that chair should be grateful,” Chris is taken aback. “I sh…” she begins, closing her eyes as if to steady herself. “I should be grateful?” The scene ends with Chris looking right into the camera and saying, “We will move on from institutional racism right after this break.”

“It was a reflection of some things that have actually happened with other journalists and athletes, and I was like, ‘Let’s do it,’” Beharie said. “I just hope that I did it some justice. My trepidation was that it is just such a big show, and I was frightened as a new person. I was nervous about her story getting lost, and I felt like I had a huge responsibility to that. I didn’t want it to just be, like, fodder.” Far from getting lost, the scene became one of the most talked-about of the season. “We’ve gotten some really good feedback,” Beharie said. “It’s why we do it, for those magic moments. And then you hope it works.” 

Asked to tease what’s to come for Chris in Season 4, due later this year, Beharie played off a recent reveal from Leder, who said at an FYC event in Los Angeles, “If the last season was about ‘What is the truth?,’ maybe this season could be about ‘who you trust.’”

“Exploring that this upcoming season is going to be really resonant with the world that we’re living in right now—or in two years,” she said. “What’s insane about what [showrunner Charlotte Stoudt] and Mimi are doing is they have to anticipate what will matter in a year or two’s time. You can’t be behind, or you have to select things that people are not over already. So it’s really quite the task. And they’re doing a magnificent job of figuring out what will stick and what will be uncomfortable and juicy and what might be going on in the world.”

This story first appeared in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How ‘Morning Show’ Newcomer Nicole Beharie Elevates the Drama and Brings ‘New Energy’ to Season 3 appeared first on TheWrap.

What she wasn’t worried about was appearing in a lackluster retread of the 2005 Doug Liman movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie — not with Glover and his “Atlanta” collaborator Sloane running the show. “I had full trust in their point of view that I just knew it was going to be something different,” she said. 

And it is. The eight-episode series, which has been renewed for a second season, weaves drama, action and wry humor to tell a complex story of a marriage in the context of dangerous missions, aliases and cool gadgets. In this telling, two lonely people are thrown together as married spies, fall in love despite themselves and try to keep their relationship intact while outrunning bad guys and explosions.

You’ve talked about how playing a 13-year-old in “Pen15” became comfortable for you because it was like wearing a protective mask. To go from that to playing a woman who’s a strong, skilled spy must have been refreshing, but was it daunting to no longer wear that “awkward teenager mask?”  

Definitely daunting. I had just had a baby. And I was so used to being a-13-year-old that doesn’t have to be quote-unquote pretty in the eyes of the audience. And there was the standard of Angelina Jolie, which is impossible to meet. It helped that they described [our characters] as normal people; it wasn’t the Hollywood glamazon version. But it still crept up on me because it was like, Oh, I have to get in shape. I have to be believably a person that would be able to get into these fights and these missions and be falling in love. I start from that physical transformation. I had to stand proud and tall and be strong and not apologize for my feelings, not apologize for what I was saying. And that’s very different from me. 

You said it was a relief to only have to act in this project, after doing “Pen15,” which I can imagine, especially if you’d just had a baby. Where there times, though, that you missed being the superwoman on set?

The weird thing was, I never felt like that. There were times where I probably wanted to insert myself more than I should have, but the great thing about Fran and Donald was they were so welcoming with me that they treated me like someone who is a writer also. So it wasn’t like, “Maya, be quiet.” They wanted me to collaborate and we would end up rewriting together on set or talking about things, so felt I was an actor who got to have a voice.

But I didn’t have the pressure of having to go off after a full day of filming and rewrite something. That was someone else’s job. It was kind of the perfect thing for me to transition into because I think there are some jobs that you could just come on to set and you might not have any voice really at all.

Jane is a better spy than John, but she downplays her talents, which felt so familiar to me. As women, we’re always apologizing for everything, including success. Did that resonate with you? 

I mean, I grew up apologizing for everything and I still do it. I still do it in my emails to work colleagues. It’s just a constant battle that I’m fighting. I actually felt with Jane that she at least didn’t do that right away. She places such an importance on success because I think that was her way of escaping loneliness. Both Jane and John are incredibly lonely people seeking connection. And that’s complicated, too, because why shouldn’t you be successful and also in a meaningful relationship? But I love that, in the end, she is the one that has to save John. She has to pick up after him.

This is a very physical role. You run so much in this, I started to think you’d replace Tom Cruise as the standard of running on screen. 

It’s funny you say Tom Cruise because, first, I’m not a runner. I smoked for many years, so my lung capacity is that of, you know, nothing. [Laughs] But in that first episode, we’re supposed to run side by side and I definitely was running slower than Donald. So he had to slow his pace. But for me to look faster, they did say, “Raise your arms like Tom Cruise.” And it works!

Jane and John struggle with honesty and communication throughout the series. That is literalized in the couples therapy scenes with Sarah Paulson, because you can’t tell her what your real job is and why it’s affecting your relationship. Was that breakdown of communication fun to play? 

The therapy episode was a really fun one to film. Just the idea of: What could you really say to a therapist? And what is it like when the therapist favors one over the other? Sarah is amazing and she intimidates me, and it felt like [her character] was favoring John the whole time. So I was like, “Wait, do you like me?” [Laughs] My favorite part, though, is actually the last episode, where I get the truth serum and we spill everything. The whole season, I did feel like I was having to hold so much in. And for me, I’m such an over-sharer by nature that it’s so hard to hold in those feelings and emotions. [Laughs] 

The verbal fight that Jane and John have while camping is intense. You both do some really phenomenal acting in that scene. It’s so raw. I don’t wish that fight on anybody.

Yeah, that scene. It kept raining and we had to wait for it to stop raining. We were all in a trailer together deconstructing it because fights are really hard to nail. If you’re watching a real fight, it can be circular and it can be repetitive and things don’t make sense sometimes and they come back around and what’s the really dark thing that someone says that sets it off and turns it into a whole other fight? And so we were playing around with that a lot and sort of rewriting it all together. And finally, we just finally decided to film it.

It was satisfying to film but also really intense because Donald, when he was fighting with me as John, there were moments that I felt like he won in a way that I couldn’t. I had nothing else to say. I felt really stunned and shut up by him. It was really hard to not feel like it was personal because it felt so personnel. I think we’ve all been in certain fights that felt reminiscent of it. And so it just felt really hurtful. So having to get out of that and be like, “Alright, okay, we’re friends, it’s fine” — yeah, that was a hard one to shoot.

You mentioned how Jane has to save John. This happens in the finale, which ends on a cliffhanger where you don’t know if the Smiths are alive or dead. 

Yes. And it’s how Fran has described it: It shows what kind of a person you are, glass half-full or glass half-empty, if you think that they survived or not.

Well, I’m such a hopeless romantic that I’m like, they have to live! 

Me too. 

So…can I hope that you return for Season 2? 

You can hope! When they first approached me, I did think it was just a one-off or if not that, then each season would be a different “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” When they’ve been talking about their plans for what a second season would be, it’s very exciting because I really like where they’re going with it. I don’t want to give anything away and I absolutely will. [Laughs] All I will say is I’m excited about where the story goes. Doesn’t mean I’m involved or not. 

A version of this story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Maya Erskine Talks Fight Scenes, Couples Therapy and Not Taking It Personally on ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“This resonates with people on a spiritual level,” she said. “I’ve had some amazing encounters with fans.”

Being a citizen of the “Star Wars” universe comes with a heavy responsibility to hold up the legacy of one of the most famous franchises of all time, fans of which have been known to get vicious when they don’t like something. A protégée of Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka is a beloved character who first appeared in the 2008 animated feature “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and was voiced by Ashley Eckstein. Introducing a live-action version of such an integral character—it’s through her that we watch Anakin move to the Dark Side in “Star Wars: Rebels”—was a gamble. But when she appeared in the second season of “The Mandalorian” in 2020, the reception was so positive that a month later, Lucasfilm announced that Ahsoka would be getting a spin-off series. In late summer 2023, “Ahsoka” began streaming on Disney+ to positive reviews. 

Being cast as Ahsoka just felt right to Dawson, who has long been a fangirl of the far-away galaxy George Lucas created a long time ago. “I think I was probably the person who knew every music cue and all the things,” she said. She didn’t feel pressure, necessarily, and embraced every minute of the animated content that formed Ahsoka’s backstory. All that, she said, “lives in my head rent-free.” Dawson knew so well the stories of the brash young Jedi—nicknamed “Snips” by Anakin—who grows into a morally conflicted master that by the time she stepped on set, she felt like she had lived them herself. “They’re like memories at this point,” she said.

Ahsoka’s appearances in “The Mandalorian” and another spin-off, “The Book of Boba Fett,” helped Dawson situate the character: She was still driven by an obsessive desire to find one of the galaxy’s big bads (the vile, blue-skinned Grand Admiral Thrawn, voiced in the animated series and played in “Ahsoka” by Lars Mikkelsen), but also enough at peace to be able to train young Grogu (a.k.a. Baby Yoda) to become a Jedi. 

“It was nice grappling with where she’s at in her life now and coming to terms with just how much she’s gone through,” Dawson said. A member of the Togruta species known for their spindly head tails, Ahsoka has weathered an almost constant chain of loss, from Order 66, which led to the galaxy-wide extermination of the Jedi, to the death of her key ally, Ezra (played by Eman Esfandi in “Ahsoka”).

“I marvel at her journey,” Dawson said. “She’s got one of the most epic arcs of any character in history, let alone in ‘Star Wars.’ She’s been exposed to so much war and at a transitional time when the Jedi are not just peacekeepers, they’re full-on militants. [She’s been] confronted with a lot of decisions at such a young age. There are things that have haunted her for a long time … especially the people she loves, and the transition she made from people who she thought were like family and finding exactly what her path is.” One of those people is Anakin Skywalker, who returned in “Ahsoka,” once again played by Hayden Christensen.

Dawson describes Ahsoka as a “ronin,” a samurai without a master: “She’s a person who is following the missions as they appear.” To get into character, Dawson said she channeled Bruce Lee. “I kept imagining real-life people because you’re in this world of these characters who are mystical in their abilities, but you want to ground it in some sort of reality,” she said.

If she was unsure about anything, she knew she could turn to showrunner Dave Filoni, who created the original animated Ahsoka Tano and wrote every episode of the live-action series. “What was so nice was that it’s not just history. He shared the emotional landscape,” Dawson said. Filoni initially created “Ahsoka” under the guidance and leadership of George Lucas, and he shared what they talked about concerning the character. “It felt really powerful to be able to be part of new storytelling and build on that history,” the actress said. 

She’s likely to keep building. A second season of “Ahsoka” has been teased, with filming reportedly beginning soon in London. The experience has been a whirlwind, but Dawson is ready for more. “It still feels like magic,” she said.

This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘Ahsoka’ Star Rosario Dawson Knows Her Jedi So Well That Her Backstory Began Feeling Like Real Memories appeared first on TheWrap.

And “Lost” became much more than a ratings hit. It was a phenomenon that influenced the next generation of television storytelling and helped give rise to the rabid fan groups (commonplace now) that came together in online forums to obsess over every last plot detail, hang on every single clue and eventually gripe about all the red herrings. 

With its innovative, serialized model of storytelling, “Lost” was a breath of fresh air in a landscape dominated by the likes of “CSI,” “American Idol” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Each week — remember, we were still eight years away from Netflix’s first original series, “Lilyhammer,” kicking off a streaming revolution — we reliably showed up, on time, to learn what was happening on the unnamed, uncharted tropical island on which the survivors of Oceanic Airlines flight 815 were stranded.

There, they reckoned with unfriendly polar bears, a transceiver playing a recorded cry for help in French on a 15-year continuous loop and a terrifying, amorphous being that fans dubbed the Smoke Monster. Each episode toggled between the island narrative, flashbacks to the characters’ pre-crash lives and even flash-forwards — all pieces to what became a tantalizing, ever-expanding narrative puzzle. 

As engineered by showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (plus executive producer and pilot director J.J. Abrams), “Lost” was groundbreaking in its high production value. The pilot itself reportedly cost more than $13 million. Narratively, it juggled more than a dozen major characters who all became an integral part of our lives. They entered and exited, storylines commenced and often abruptly concluded (Nikki and Paulo, good riddance). Throughout, “Lost” engaged with and upended archetypes (the scoundrel with a heart of gold, the mysterious stranger) that would almost certainly have been played straight everywhere else on network television back then. 

“Lost” wasn’t just a show we watched, it was an interactive experience we shared, as we dreamed up and debated theories, wrapped ourselves in the island’s interlocking mysteries and tried to uncover its myriad secrets. Its storyline and narrative foundation carried a rare blend of philosophical, sociological and theological heft, zeroing in on mediations on life, death, birth and rebirth.

Over its six-season run, “Lost” regularly topped critics’ lists, won Emmys and was imitated by dozens of short-lived shows that unsuccessfully tried to evoke its addictive serialized structure, moody tone and sophisticated aesthetic. Its Emmy success, though, was front-loaded: It won the Outstanding Drama Series award for its first season, but became one of the few shows to score a Season 1 victory and never again win. Overall, six of the total 10 Emmys it would win came for that first season, with no subsequent season winning more than one.

By the time the polarizing two-part finale aired in May 2010, some of the show’s initial glow had dimmed: Ratings had dipped into the (still respectable) 11-million range and some critics contended that it had become an unwieldy mess. As the last moments of the last episode unfolded, some of the many big questions the show posed had finally been answered (so that’s how the Smoke Monster came to be!), but others (Why were Hurley’s numbers cursed?) remained frustratingly out of reach. They still are.

But maybe, with “Lost” now available to binge at any time on Disney+ and Hulu, those lingering enigmas are our invitation to return to the island. Maybe, we’ll think about Walt or Ben or Juliet or Jin and Sun and find ourselves saying, like Matthew Fox’s reluctant hero, Jack, “We have to go back.” 

This story first appeared in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post 20 Years Ago, ABC’s ‘Lost’ Premiered and Changed TV appeared first on TheWrap.