character

A FEMALE rapped has died aged 37 after suffering a heart attack as her devastated friends pay tribute.

Gianina Gheorghiu recently passed away with her close friends revealing she had been battling an alcohol problem.

Going by the stage name Chica Con Canna, the rapper dominated the scene in her country, forging an impressive career.

The news left her friends and fans devastated after her death was announced on March 9.

The Romanian rapper was huge in her local scene, collaborating with stars such as Tony Batrânu, Vladone and Mike Diamondz.

Her close friend Dana Marijauna spoke of her death in a heartbreaking tribute to the musician.

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Although there is no official confirmation on what caused the heart attack Dana believes she “did not win the fight against alcohol”.

The rapper stated: “With tears in my eyes, with a fantastic love for Chica, who did not win the fight against alcohol.

“A girl with great talent, the best female voice and interpretation in English in the world of Romanian rap, soulful, generous, strong character.

“In vain, alcohol did not take into account all its countless qualities.

“We love you even in a billion years.

“We were supposed to record new songs, but we will do it without physical presence.”

The star’s untimely death has left a void in the Romanian rap industry with a number of artists, including Dana, claiming they had future projects with her.

The rapper confirmed that the projects will go ahead in her memory.

AUSTIN, Texas — “The Sun Never Sets” is filmmaker Joe Swanberg’s 10th indie to premiere at SXSW but his first to play the event since 2017. The astonishing pace with which he made his early work — loose, idiosyncratic stories that were progenitors of the emergent style known as mumblecore — has slowed significantly, but also given way to a newfound maturity as both a person and an artist.

Introducing “The Sun Never Sets” at its world premiere on Friday night to a sold-out crowd at the Zach Theater, Swanberg called his latest “my favorite film I’ve ever made.” Shot on 35mm in Anchorage, the movie follows a 30-ish woman, Wendy (Dakota Fanning in a vibrant turn), torn between pursuing a fresh romance with a reckless old flame (Cory Michael Smith) or continuing on with the settled-in-his-ways divorced father of two (Jake Johnson) she’s been seeing for a few years.

Dakota Fanning in Joe Swanberg’s “The Sun Never Sets,” filmed in Alaska.

(SXSW)

“I guess this is what they tell you about getting older and doing this job longer,” said a thoughtful Swanberg in a video interview from his home in Chicago shortly before the South by Southwest festival. “You get better at it and you sort of mature and all of this.”

The film marks Swanberg’s fourth collaboration with Johnson, a partnership that goes back to 2013’s “Drinking Buddies.” (The actor partly financed the new project along with his brother.) Following completion of the third season of the Netflix anthology series “Easy” in 2019, for which he wrote and directed all the episodes, Swanberg was planning to take a break. A divorce and the pandemic caused that pause to grow even longer.

In the intervening years Swanberg produced a number of projects for other filmmakers, did some acting and opened a small video store in Chicago. Swanberg knew Anchorage-based producer Ashleigh Snead, who encouraged him to consider shooting something there. The scenic location would give Swanberg the opportunity to expand his visual style from his usual couches, bars and apartments of much of his work. (There still are a surprising number of scenes on couches and in bars.)

“Joe’s a real filmmaker,” says Johnson in a separate interview. “And I think sometimes he doesn’t get that credit because he can make movies with nothing. This is a real adult movie. This is a film about how complicated breakups are and how messy they get. And it’s in beautiful Alaska.”

Swanberg, center, on the set of “The Sun Never Sets.”

(SXSW)

Swanberg has now gone from someone making talky, provocative and at times controversial films about the lives of post-collegiate 20-somethings to exploring the nuances and specifics of being a 44-year-old divorced father of two still trying to figure out his place in the world. His original cohort of SXSW-affiliated filmmakers, many of whom also fell under the rubric of mumblecore — nobody much liked the name, but no one ever came up with anything better, so it stuck — included Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Barry Jenkins, Ti West and others who have gone on to more conventional mainstream success.

But Swanberg doesn’t seem to feel left behind. Rather, he only sees doors opening.

“It’s gone so much better than I thought it was going to go for me,” he says. “I mean, when I was making these really tiny, sexually explicit 71-minute movies, I was like, I’m just grateful to be here. I can’t even believe these festivals are showing this work and it’s so cool that there’s a space for me in this ecosystem.

“And so to watch my friends go off to do these giant movies, to see Greta doing ‘Barbie’ and stuff like that, to me it just opens up the possibilities,” he adds. “Each time a friend of mine sets some new record or moves into some new space, I’m kind of like: Oh, that just opened up for all of us now.”

His earlier work often featured raw sex scenes, sometimes featuring Swanberg himself. From practically the start of his career, well predating the #MeToo-era reckoning that began in 2017, Swanberg weathered accusations that he was exploitative and manipulative of his female performers. His stepback from productivity coincided with a moment when his explorations of sexual power dynamics fell out of favor. It would be easy to interpret that Swanberg preemptively soft-canceled himself to avoid a broader scandal. He doesn’t see it that way.

“Certainly in Chicago, where I’ve spent the last five years, I’m not unwelcome places,” he says, drawing a distinction between himself and “people who lose jobs or are capital-C canceled. But also my work has always pushed those boundaries and always attracted some amount of positive and negative attention.”

Though “The Sun Never Sets” has numerous kissing scenes, it doesn’t go too much further than that.

“I won’t do it,” Johnson says of more graphic scenes. “When I worked with Joe early on, I was like, ‘I love you, man — I’m not doing this.’”

For her part, Fanning had no reservations about working with Swanberg. He offered both Fanning and Smith the opportunity to work with an intimacy coordinator, but neither felt it was necessary.

“There was no planet where you’d ever be asked to do anything you were uncomfortable with,” Fanning says. “If there was ever a moment like, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ he’d be like, ‘Oh, then let’s not.’ There was a day where there was a scene and it was pouring rain outside. And we both looked at each other and he was like, ‘We’re not going to do it. The scene’s cut.’ He’s just open. And I just trusted him implicitly.”

Jake Johnson and Dakota Fanning in the movie “The Sun Never Sets.”

(SXSW)

Swanberg has long worked in an unusual style in which the script is essentially a detailed outline and the actors work to come up with their own dialogue during rehearsals. For “The Sun Never Sets,” Swanberg and Johnson developed the longest, most complete outline Swanberg has ever used, including some dialogue exchanges. Then the actors were allowed to make it their own.

Fanning recalled an early Zoom call with Swanberg and Johnson on which they explained the process.

“It’s still made like a real film,” Fanning says. “And Jake and Joe promised it’s not like we’re just flying by the seat of our pants: ‘You will know what to say, I promise.’ And then friends that know me asked, ‘Are you so nervous?’ And I was, but for some reason, I don’t know why, I just knew that it was going to be fine. And that just proved to be true.”

Even though it takes places in Anchorage, Swanberg calls “The Sun Never Sets” “extremely personal.”

“I was definitely writing a movie about a divorced mid-40s guy dating a younger person,” he says. “The questions of marriage and having children were sort of an amalgam of two real relationships that I merged into one onscreen.” He describes the material as “questions that I had and have about what my own relationships are going to look like post-divorce.”

That comes through in Fanning’s rich, layered performance, which might rank among the best of her already lengthy career. Swanberg’s style draws both an ease and an intensity from Fanning, who captures a woman at a pivotal moment of figuring out what she wants amid the emotional whirlwind she is going through. (At the film’s premiere, Fanning said, “I’ve never put so much of myself into a role before.”)

“I think the goal of Joe’s films, and I think at least my goal with this film, is trying to make everything feel real,” she says. “Things are just a mess some of the time.”

Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith in “The Sun Never Sets.”

(SXSW)

Swanberg himself appears in a small role as the new husband of the ex-wife of Johnson’s character. And the characters of the two kids in the movie are named after the director’s own children. With a newfound maturity and emotional depth, Swanberg is continuing to make movies that are part diary, part generational markers.

“It’d be really cool in my 40s to make movies about characters in their 40s,” he says, “and in my 50s, 60s and 70s. It’d be neat to be making sexually explicit movies about 70-year-olds in their dating lives and sex lives and stuff. It’s really exciting to have movies about characters at this phase of their life, whether they’re finally settling down in their 40s or whether they’re getting out of relationships and reexamining their life. It’s where my head is at.”
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“Beast Mode” started as a phrase people used to describe the running style of former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch.

“I think it was just my relentlessness and my no-back-down type of demeanor when it came to running the ball, like, ‘Boy, that boy a beast,’” Lynch said. “And it’s like, yeah, when I get the ball, that’s what type of mode I’m in — I’m in beast mode.”

Lynch played 12 seasons for the Buffalo Bills, Seattle Seahawks and Oakland Raiders, amassing 10,413 in 2,453 carries with 85 touchdowns. Somewhere along the way, he said, the phrase “Beast Mode” evolved into “this persona bigger than myself.”

“The way that I get approached by kids and fans, like the way that they approach me is almost as if I am like a character so to speak, and I don’t think that I was doing it justice because I’m like, ‘Well s—, I’m just only a man,” the Super Bowl XLVIII champion said.

“But I believe in their mind what they had made up as Beast Mode is this larger-than-life, kind of surreal individual.”

An early look at a page from the upcoming “Beast Mode 510” graphic novel, starring Marshawn Lynch as the title character. Text will be added closer to the Oct. 6 publishing date.

(Art by Denys Cowan / Courtesy of AWA)

Lynch is embracing that perception of himself … and Beast Mode is about to become a literal comic book hero.

On Friday, Arists Writers and Artisans announced the graphic novel “Beast Mode 510,” which is scheduled to be released Oct. 6. Written by NAACP Image Award-nominated author Sheldon Allen and illustrated by Eisner Hall of Fame artist Denys Cowan, the book was “inspired and guided by” Lynch and is a “deeply personal love letter” to his hometown Oakland, according to a news release from AWA.

“At its center is Beast Mode: the 510’s legendary fixer and freelance sleuth whose rough exterior hides a code of loyalty and willingness to deal with problems others won’t touch,” the release reads. “If you’ve got a problem the authorities won’t handle, Beast Mode will. No invoices. No contracts. Just results.”

AWA chief creative officer Axel Alonso said when he was approached by Lynch and his team about possibly working on a project together, the idea of turning Beast Mode into an almost superhuman crime fighter quickly came to mind.

“To use a football analogy, when Marshawn and his people came to me and said, ‘Can you do anything with this, Beast Mode?’ it was like they gave me the ball on the one-yard line and I had to just walk it in — and Pete Carroll wasn’t the coach, so I could just go right in,” Alonso said, referring to an infamous play at the end of Seattle’s loss to New England in Super Bowl XLIX.

“It was as easy as that. I was like, come on, ‘Beast Mode’? So automatically I talked with Marshawn and said, ‘What’s important to you?’”

Lynch’s input has been key every step of the way, Alonso said, with the five-time Pro Bowl selection getting final say on every aspect. Lynch said he appreciates having his voice heard and being able to put his stamp on the project.

“From the start, we just sat down and had a conversation about where it was that we wanted to go, what is the kind of feel, the look that we want, the kind of tone that we want to tell the story,” Lynch said.

Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch #24 of the Seattle Seahawks runs for a 67-yard touchdown against the New Orleans Saints during an NFC wild-card playoff game Jan. 8, 2011, at Qwest Field.

(Jonathan Ferrey / Getty Images)

An early look at pages from the upcoming “Beast Mode 510” graphic novel starring Super Bowl champion Marshawn Lynch as an underground crime fighter.

(Art by Denys Cowan / Courtesy of AWA)

“I can’t draw or nothing like that, but any type of update or anything Axel will get over to me and, you know what I mean, yea or nay. And then when it comes to like how certain characters would look, certain names, individuals — I would say I’m involved, but I’m not stepping on their toes.”

For Lynch, one of the top priorities was to bring attention to all the unique aspects of his beloved city.

“We kinda have Oakland being a character of its own,” he said. “The personality of what Oakland stands for is something that I would really like to highlight ‘cause I feel that my city gets overlooked. And then the amount of individuals that we have coming out of area, it’s also an opportunity to show a nod to a lot of the Bay Area cultures and icons that we have.”

Even though the book is fiction, Lynch insisted on authenticity in the depictions of the city and the people who live there, including the way they look, act and speak.

“I think the biggest thing will probably be just the way that I speak in general,” Lynch said. “Mother— from where I’m from, we talk with a certain type of a tone, a type of swag.”

An early look at a page from the upcoming “Beast Mode 510” graphic novel. Marshawn Lynch says his character was inspired by the larger-than-life persona fans sometimes associate with him.

(Art by Denys Cowan / Courtesy of AWA.)

And, judging from Lynch’s signature way of talking, a lot of profanity.

None of Lynch’s ideas has been toned down.

“This is an R-rated book,” Alonso said.

“I want this s— to be turned up to the max,” Lynch added, “so if a mother— do pick this up to read, it’s gonna be like, ‘Oh, this some real s—.’ As well as entertaining, as well as insightful and impactful.”

Lynch is used to keeping people entertained, including as the co-host of the “Get Got Pod” with former Seahawks teammate Mike Robinson and as an actor with numerous roles in TV and film (including a breakout performancein 2023’s “Bottoms”).

He said he’s proud of how the project is turning out.

“When you see work and be like, ‘Damn that s— was nice’ and you start thinking about the thought process and how they got to those points, how they got to those things that drew you in, those things that give you that warm feeling,” Lynch said, “I’m feeling like I’m living that as this s— is going.

“Which is crazy as f— because I played in Super Bowls, I walked the red carpet of f—in’ premieres, and this one feels like, out of a lot of s—, this one is capturing that feeling for me. I’m a [Black man] — you know we don’t feel too much. But when we do, we be like, ‘Oh yeah, you know this s— is special.’”

One of the biggest takeaways from the biography “Judy Blume: A Life” may not be in the story itself but in its author. Because of her frank talk about puberty and sexual awakenings, Blume’s work is usually associated with young female readers. Her biographer, Mark Oppenheimer, is a middle-aged father of five.

He says he received minimal pushback on the idea that a man should be allowed to write Blume’s definitive life story. If the whole point of her books is that there should be no shame in body awareness, what service does it do to say only a woman has the authority to write her story? Plus, although her books aren’t selling as well as they used to — who’s are? — Oppenheimer’s biography points out that there are still plenty of parents who will throw a copy of her seminal “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” at their kids rather than have the menstruation talk or risk any misinformation that may be online.

“No good writer should be ghettoized,” Oppenheimer says during a recent Zoom call with The Times. “If you’re a good writer, you shouldn’t be marketed just to girls or just to boys or just to white people or just to straight people. Good art should be for everyone.”

It is intrinsic and impossible not to parlay Blume’s stories of sibling rivalries, first loves, friends and frenemies, and (most famously) puberty with what was going on in your life when you read them. Books like “Deenie” and “Superfudge” and “Margaret” are also remarkably malleable enough so that, even if a kid picks them up decades after their release or cannot relate with a parallel experience, they can become placeholders and explainers for what must be going on in the minds of their classmates. Last year, TV creator Mara Brock Akil adapted “Forever,” Blume’s 1975 story of the kind of mutually shared devotion that feels like it will last eternally, into a miniseries set in 2018 Los Angeles.

“I think for many of us, Judy’s books are our first crush or our first love and they do hold a special place that no book we read in our world-weary, cynical 40s can hold,” says Oppenheimer.

Some of this can be attributed to time and brain space. Oppenheimer discovered Blume’s work when he was a child. He’s now a parent, with a career and all the other time-sucks that come with adulthood.

“The books I read as a child imprinted on me in a way that books today don’t,” he says. “I probably remember more plot points of the first Judy Blume books that I read than I do of any book I’ve read in the past five years.”

But what of Blume herself? Can America’s mom also be a three-dimensional person who makes her own mistakes? Discovering her four adult novels — especially “Wifey,” a book about a gilded-caged suburban housewife that even Oppenheimer describes as “a very salacious, one might say, smutty, adult novel” that even some of Blume’s collaborators wanted her to publish under a pseudonym — or watching documentaries about her like 2023’s “Judy Blume Forever,” in which she is seen joking about masturbation with employees at her Key West, Fla., bookstore, can seem as evasive and dangerous as reading your mom’s diary.

Author Mark Oppenheimer

(Lu Arie)

There have been other books about Blume and her work, most notably Rachelle Bergstein’s 2024 deep-dive “The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us.” But Oppenheimer’s biography is a more straightforward tracing of Blume’s life and career. He starts with her childhood when she was encouraged to read Philip Roth at home and went to sleepovers at friends’ houses that were more about body awakenings. He discusses her stifling first marriage, which gave her the last name she carries with her to this day and her two children but is also where she hung her college diploma and another award over her washing machine as reminders of her intellect. There’s talk of her second marriage, which Blume has always been reluctant to discuss, as well as the two abortions that resulted from it. And there are details on her life with her third husband, the polymath George Cooper.

Oppenheimer relied on past news stories about Blume, as well as a collection of her work and professional correspondences that are archived at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and, probably most informatively, his own interviews with Blume and her friends and family. (Although Blume did agree to speak with Oppenheimer for his book, she declined our request to interview her for this story about that book).

“I think that the difficult subjects are sometimes the ones that make her more relatable,” Oppenheimer says of his subject. “I think most of her fans will find it interesting and admirable that she speaks so candidly about her abortions, about especially her divorce from her first husband, which came as she was getting involved in the [second-wave] women’s movement, about her early same-sex experiences, about masturbation as a girl; these are things we would expect Judy Blume to be candid about.”

Oppenheimer matches how these life events correspond with the ones of Blume’s characters because, for better or for worse, she almost always was an author who wrote what she knew even if her fandom transcended it. What her books lack in character diversity, they make up for in specificity. And that, in turn, also makes them relatable.

“Judy found incredibly compelling human drama in books about the New Jersey suburbs, and that’s a testament to her strength as an artist,” Oppenheimer says.

Writer Judy Blume at her nonprofit bookstore Books and Books on March 26, 2023, in Key West, Fla.

(Mary Martin / Associated Press)

Examining and reexamining Blume’s work as an adult also gave Oppenheimer a better perspective of her writing style. Blume didn’t begin to try to write professionally until she was a married mother of two and some have criticized her work for not being as flowery and polished as others’.

“All of her books tend to take a fairly tight focus on the characters,” Oppenheimer says. “They don’t tend to pull back and look at large societal forces or changes going on in the country or the world. And that’s fine. You know, the same could be said of Jane Austen.”

Perhaps the best example of this is Blume’s own religious foundation. Her most autobiographical novel, “Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself,” has a protagonist who is paranoid that she sees Adolf Hitler on park benches and whose life is imprinted with stories of a relative who followed her mother into the concentration camps and the neighbors sitting shiva (a time of mourning) for their daughter who got pregnant with her non-Jewish boyfriend. And yet, Oppenheimer notes, Blume is not always immediately thought of as a Jewish writer. Nor have most of her readers been Jewish.

“I think that her Judaism is there, if you know where to look,” says Oppenheimer, who spends the early part of his biography looking at how the synagogue and religious community were a normal part of a young Blume’s life. He adds that “she is somebody who speaks really, really well across religious, cultural and racial differences, and that’s partly why she has sold tens of millions of books.”

Oppenheimer acknowledges that Blume’s characters may not be diverse enough by today’s standards; that they don’t usually discuss “gender identities or sexualities; children of multiracial backgrounds; children who have disabilities.” They can also feel like time capsules to other dimensions; his 12-year-old daughter was scandalized by how normative bullying was after she read “Blubber,” Blume’s 1974 novel about tween mean girls and body shaming.

He adds that some of today’s bestselling young adult novels, like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series about a teen demigod or Suzanne Collins’ dystopia-set “Hunger Games” books, are “contemporary realism [that] focus on extraordinary or unusual circumstances.” And while he’s happy for these books’ popularities, he says that some subjects may be better told by kids who also aren’t tasked with saving the world. (I am pretty sure I learned more about male puberty from Blume’s 1971 story “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” which is as much about wealth divides and questionable friend choices as it is about a 13-year-old boy’s inner monologues about her awkward adolescence).

“If what you’re looking for is realism that isn’t focused on obvious external differences, but rather on interiority,” Oppenheimer says, “then Judy Blume still remains one of the premier novelists that you would want to read.”

Friedlander is a pop culture and entertainment journalist based in Los Angeles who hates coffee but loves Coke Zero.

In “Rooster,” a genial comedy premiering Sunday on HBO, Steve Carell, comfortable as an uncomfortable person, plays Greg Russo, the author of a best-selling series of books whose hero is named Rooster. He has come to leafy, fictional Ludlow College to give a reading, but also because it’s where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive) teaches art history, and because it’s all over school that her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a history professor, has left her for Sunny (Lauren Tsai), a graduate student in neuroscience. He’s a concerned father.

“They are light; they are fun. The characters that you like have sex, the ones you don’t get shot in the face,” Greg tells poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) of the “beach read” books he writes, as she ushers him to an auditorium. Unlike his fictional alter ego, Greg is by his own account a self-conscious introvert, heightened by the fact that his ex-wife, Elizabeth (Connie Britton) — “a philanthropist, a pioneer in corporate gender equality and an accomplished CEO” whose name adorns the school’s new student center — left him five years earlier and he never moved on. Additionally, Greg likes nuts and cocoa, can toss a penny into a jar from across a room, and played minor league hockey, which will put him back on skates here.

College president Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) decides it would be “a feather in his cap” to hire a reluctant Greg, “a best-selling author that the parents have actually heard of,” as an artist-in-residence — a deal he makes impossible to refuse by agreeing to keep Katie on staff after she accidentally burns down Archie’s house. (She was only trying to burn his first edition of “War & Peace.”) It’s a role quite like the one McGinley played/plays on “Scrubs,” but more politic and better dressed, when dressed — he takes meetings in his backyard sauna.

And they’re off.

Poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) and author Greg (Steve Carell) become colleagues when Greg is named artist-in-residence.

(Katrina Marcinowski / HBO)

The series was created by Bill Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking,” “Scrubs,” “Bad Monkey”) and frequent collaborator Matt Tarses, and as men of at least a certain age, the view is slanted from experience back toward innocence; students play a secondary, though not insignificant role in the story. There are some pro forma jokes about the sensitivities of the young, with Greg getting into not-very-hot water over misunderstood references to “white whale” and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.” (“Liberal arts college used to be havens for free thought, Greg,” says Walt. “When did you and I become the bad guys?”) Not that the olds are reliably smart about life — the ways in which they’re not power the series — but they have a better notion of where they’re stupid.

“No one must be humiliated,” Greg says to Archie, quoting Chekhov, as Archie goes off to talk to Katie. (The quote is in the animated opening titles as well, so you can take it as important.) But no one here is out to humiliate anyone, which is nasty and unkind and not at all the sort of humor Lawrence trades in. Of course, characters will be put into embarrassing positions, or embarrass themselves, embarrassment being the root of all comedy, or near enough. (There’s a good bit of slapstick knitted in.) And though we’re told that “there are real villains lurking around this place,” niceness reigns — at least through the six episodes, of 10, available to review — with the possible exception of Alan Ruck as the dean of English. (“There’s no way she wrote all these poems,” he says of Emily Dickinson.)

Though there are couples, and ex-couples and new couples, one doesn’t necessarily feel invested in their getting together, or staying together, or getting back together. Indeed, as in other Lawrence projects — which typically feature divorced or separated characters — romance is a sort of side dish, less the issue than whether people are managing to treat one another well. We knew Ted Lasso wasn’t going to get his wife back, but it wasn’t the point (nor was winning games, really); kindness was what mattered. Greg’s possibly pre-romantic friendship with Dylan is no more significant than his cross-generational friendship with a group of goofball students (led by Maximo Solas as Tommy); they treat each other as peers, while knowing they aren’t. He teaches them that peanut butter can make celery better, and they teach him that he’s cooler than he thinks.

Katie, who says she still loves Archie — who says he still loves her — will also call him “a run-of-the-mill narcissistic a— who sometimes smells like wildflowers.” (As for Sunny, practical and deadpan — that no one gets her jokes is a running joke — not even Archie can see what she sees in him, a problem you might have as well, but, as is true of most everyone here, we’re not meant to merely write him off. Funny secondary characters, who get some of the best business, notably include Rory Scovel as a cop who can’t keep track of his gun, Robby Hoffman as Sunny’s intense, anti-Archie roommate and Annie Mumolo (co-writer of “Bridesmaids”) as Walt’s arch assistant.

Old-but-not-that-old-fashioned, “Rooster” has a tinge of Gen X nostalgia, underscored by the ’80s college radio classics that line the soundtrack. (R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe co-wrote and sings the series’ theme, and Greg, drunk and in a mood, will kill a party getting the DJ to play “Everybody Hurts.” Directed by Jonathan Krisel (“Portlandia,” “Baskets”), it’s low stakes, soft-edged, humane, basically gentle, a little fantastic, a little farcical, well cast and well played in every instance — qualities I happen to like, and maybe you do, too.

They knew he was going to break. And they leaned into it.

That’s the only explanation for this week’s Ryan Gosling-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which at times felt more like an inside cast joke than a typical “SNL” episode. But maybe it’s the “Project Hail Mary” actor’s innate charm or that there were genuine laughs to be mined from Gosling breaking character again and again throughout the show (as he did just two years ago) that made it somehow work.

Gosling kept his cool for the most part in a well-executed monologue that focused on next week’s host and musical guest Harry Styles, who was sitting in the front row and inadvertently driving Gosling to distraction with his coolness. But after that, it was a short trip to Giggle Town as Gosling tried valiantly to play a flamboyantly dressed disruptor at a wedding who keeps tapping his glasses so the bride and groom (and others) will kiss.

In a fantasy sketch, he played one of three very dumb cyclops who can’t solve easy riddles, much to the dismay of two maidens — one of them, the usually unflappable Ashley Padilla, caught the giggles from Gosling and couldn’t stop laughing. Padilla and Gosling were a teacher and principal in another sketch reading passed notes out loud that, according to text on screen, were swapped out since rehearsal, causing both to crack up uncontrollably. It was the first “SNL” sketch in a long time, not counting “Weekend Update,” that felt like a prank on the performers.

Gosling stayed in character for the most part as an annoyed hotel patron who’s been overcharged for visits from the “Goo Goo Man.” And he had less opportunity to lose his cool in some pre-taped sketches, one a violent and sad Willy Wonka parody, the other about a sentient and weird treatment for psoriasis, “Otezla.”

Whether you enjoyed the episode would depend a lot on your tolerance for “SNL” performers breaking character and causing cast members to do the same. Gosling may be one of the few hosts who can get away with it since by this point, it’s his fourth time hosting and it’s completely expected.

The show concluded with “Lies,” a video sketch from Please Don’t Destroy’s Martin Herlihy in which, among other things, Herlihy stole Colin Jost’s identity by wearing a giant head modeled after the “Weekend Update” host.

Musical guests Gorillaz performed their 25-year-old hit “Clint Eastwood” with Del the Funky Homosapien and new song “The Moon Cave” with Asha Puthli, Anoushka Shankar and Black Thought. A memorial card before the goodbyes honored Sandy Wernick, Adam Sandler’s longtime manager, who died this week.

Jost returned as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was introduced doing a keg stand (but full of Sprite, he claimed), before launching into an explainer about the conflict in Iran. “We’re treating Iran like the breathalizer in my car and blowing it the hell up!” he said. He paraphrased Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” (“Cut Iran into pieces!”) and described the U.S. in Iran as not a war but a “situationship” where if the United States gets bored, it will go hook up with Cuba next. After shouting out “Grand Theft Auto,” Megan Fox’s return to Instagram and Quagmire from “Family Guy,” Hegseth introduced former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, whom he said was “reassigned under the bus.” Noem (Padilla) said she wasn’t fired, she self-deported and will soon be working out of a WeWork outside of Denver. “As I told my plastic surgeon, the work is never done,” she said, “you miss 100% of the dogs you don’t shoot.” It must be said: it was a relief to have a cold open that didn’t feature a rambling President Trump.

In his monologue, Gosling began going through the motions of singing a song about Earth (with a planetary model hanging down as a visual) before getting distracted by pop star Harry Styles in the front row. Styles, next week’s “SNL” host, said he just wanted to get a feel for it. Before long, smitten cast members, including Sarah Sherman and a cameraman wearing an I (Heart) Harry shirt who kept focusing on Styles, proved too much for Gosling, who called off a big song and dance number featuring most of the cast in silver space attire. Gosling started to sing “Sign of the Times” which is featured in his film “Project Hail Mary” before realizing it’s a Harry Styles song. “I’m just Ken!” Gosling flailed. Cast members consoled him, including a kiss on the cheek from Mikey Day that sent Gosling into a spontaneous giggle attack. Gosling thanked Kenan Thompson for coming out to support him. “We just came to get a better look at Harry,” Thompson replied.

Best sketch of the night: Riddle me this, why are these cyclops so dumb?

In a sketch based on a fictional book, “The Treasure of Darlor,” three cyclops led by Gosling must get past two maidens (Padilla and Veronika Slowikowska) in order to get the key to a cave that will grant them, presumably, the treasure of the book’s title. But the cyclops can’t solve the simplest of riddles and the increasingly exasperated maidens, who’ll be free once a riddle is solved, can’t get them to stop approaching the cave or from making terrible guesses. It’s hard to tell how far off script the sketch went once Gosling and Padilla began breaking character, but the characters are so silly and dumb that precision actually doesn’t matter too much and the result is a ramshackle hilarity as they keep going in semantic circles.

Also good: No notes. Seriously, no more notes, please

Maybe this was funnier for those on stage than for those watching at home, but the audacity of a sketch in which material is swapped out before air time (as we’re told in an on-screen warning) to unaware cast members and the host, breathed life into what would have otherwise been a pretty routine sketch about a teacher (Padilla) and a principal (Gosling) trying to discipline unruly students. Padilla almost never breaks in sketches; she’s a rock-solid performer, but without any advance knowledge of the jokes in notes she had to read out loud, she simply crumbled. Gosling never had a chance. The jokes in the notes are not all great, but they’re enough to have their intended effect on the two performers. The laughing becomes infectious.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Pastor Update was really itemizing those backstage snacks

The next best thing we might get to a new “What Up With That?” sketch might be Thompson as Pastor Update, the official pastor to “Weekend Update” who was joined by his bandleader Teddy (James Austin Johnson). The two brought some soulful rumination on catered snacks and beautiful women with big foreheads. When Michael Che asked for something a little more uplifting, Pastor Update instead went after Che’s online habits, praying he “gets off his laptop looking at them nasty pictures on the computer.” The laptop, he sang, has been infected with so many nasty viruses it sounds like a lawnmower starting up.

“Pond rules” dictate that if an animal is hungry, the creature that’s about to become a meal should accept its fate. That’s the first lesson that Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), an idealistic university student whose mind is transferred into the body of a robotic beaver, learns while interacting with wildlife as one of their own in Pixar’s inventive “Hoppers.” In typical human fashion (we love to meddle with nature), Mabel ends up breaking that directive by saving a “fellow” beaver, the slumberous Loaf (Eduardo Franco), attracting unwanted attention that leads her to a wacky group of characters who will transform her rigid young worldview.

For his second feature, Daniel Chong, best known for creating the popular “We Bare Bears” series for Cartoon Network, has unleashed a hilariously unexpected and outrageous crowd-pleaser with “Hoppers.” Recently, I bemoaned that a movie like Sony’s “Goat” stood as further proof that talking-animal animated films had mostly run their course. Chong and screenwriter Jesse Andrews swiftly push back on that read with this environmentalist tale in defense of people who stand up for something, even when it seems no one is willing to stand beside them.

“Hoppers” is Pixar by way of a creator, Chong, whose career isn’t exclusively tied to the studio. That’s likely why his movie is more daring in its humor and tone, bringing a refreshing infusion of mischief to Pixar while maintaining the genuine emotional gravitas that has endeared the company to audiences for over 30 years.

Why is Mabel’s psyche roaming around inside a fake beaver à la “Avatar”? After discovering that this technology has been developed by one of her professors, Mabel thinks it could be the answer to saving the local forest glade where self-aggrandizing mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) wants to build a highway. Mabel’s grandmother instilled in her an appreciation for nature as a reminder that she’s part of something greater than herself. Collecting signatures isn’t yielding results to stop construction, so, to the dismay of the scientists in charge, Mabel hops into the human-made mammal to learn from the creatures themselves why they’ve left the glade, giving Jerry carte blanche to destroy their home.

The poignancy-to-comedy ratio is precisely calibrated. Sharp gags, whether visual or in superbly timed lines of dialogue often laced with irony, work on multiple levels. A few moments like an accidental death or the wild introduction of an aquatic character are so wonderfully out of left field they make one’s head spin. That also goes for instances late in Mabel’s adventure in which “Hoppers” steps into amusingly creepy terrain, paying homage to the horror genre. These impish touches involve a wicked caterpillar (Dave Franco) whose mother, the Insect Queen, is voiced by acting royalty Meryl Streep. Each group of animals has its own ruler.

Since most scenes occur in the forest glade, the artists at Pixar have created strikingly rendered settings which, while aiming for photorealism, also have a fantastical glow to them, highlighting the inherent magic of nature. That such a seemingly commonplace location is elevated to feel mesmerizing speaks to how animation can make the mundane anew. That’s on top of how the rotund beavers in “Hoppers” have been conceived for maximum cuteness. One of them, Mabel’s guide through this ecosystem, is the disarmingly adorable King George (Bobby Moynihan), who wears a tiny crown (Where did he get it? No one knows) and rules over all mammals with a gentle hand.

Mabel’s friendship with King George, who doesn’t know she is human, becomes the movie’s heartstring-pulling core. The jovial royal believes he can persuade Jerry to change course. Mabel, conversely, doesn’t think Jerry will listen. Her cynicism and King George’s sincere faith in others clash. Among Mabel’s non-furry pals, Tom Lizard (Tom Law) becomes a scene-stealer. (The crazy-eyed, eloquent reptile first became an online sensation as part of a post-credits scene in “Elio.”)

Chong and his team include a minuscule but brilliant detail that illustrates how character design can have major narrative impact: When the animals are speaking among themselves, their eyes are large and expressive, full of life. But when the film takes the perspective of a human looking at the forest dwellers, their eyes appear small and dark, almost nondescript. It’s a subtly visual symbol for how we often fail to gaze at others with understanding.

There are many heavy hitters still to come, but “Hoppers” feels like the first great animated movie of the year. At a time when our right to protest is under siege, this sci-fi yarn exalts the way an individual’s conviction can plant seeds of change, leading to a stronger sense of community. Neither simplistically optimistic nor preachy, “Hoppers” smuggles timely ideas inside a rodent body. Pond rules would probably call that a beaver victory.

The saga of “A Court of Thorns and Roses” will continue.

Author Sarah J. Maas announced on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast Wednesday that two new books will be released in the hugely popular romantasy series, ending a five-year drought since the fifth installment, “A Court of Silver Flames.” The sixth book will be published on Oct. 27, 2026, and the seventh on Jan. 12, 2027.

“It took me a while to find the right story and to be in the right headspace. And then, like what poured out of me was this and it poured out very quickly,” the author told Cooper. “The story that was finally ready to come out of me was big. Really, really big.”

Maas first teased the sixth book on Instagram in July, with the caption “First drafts DONE” on a video that drew nearly a million likes.

Maas did not share details about the book titles, cover art or whose point of view the stories will follow, but did mention that the character’s perspective was “one of the surprising things” for her while writing.

On Instagram, Maas thanked her fans for their patience, passion and “never letting the world fade.”

“I know how long you’ve waited. I know how much these characters mean to you. And I also know these stories deserve more than speed and deadlines. They deserve my best self. They deserve the right moment,” Maas wrote. “I’m so honored by the way you guys have always embraced Prythian as your own. I truly hope it feels like coming home for you like it did for me.”

The first installment of the “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series was released in 2015, but the franchise gained popularity on BookTok — a TikTok subcommunity dedicated to literature — during the COVID-19 pandemic. The books follow Feyre Archeron in the faerie lands of Prythian and her love story with the High Lord of the Night Court, Rhysand.

Maas has sold more than 70 million English copies between her interconnected “Throne of Glass,” “A Court of Thorns and Roses” and “Crescent City” series, according to her website. Maas is a major player in the romantasy — a portmanteau of romance and fantasy — genre, which has soared in popularity on TikTok.

“This is going to sound silly, and you probably won’t believe me, but just talking about things like legacy is beyond for me,” Maas told Cooper. “I’m still very much that girl in middle school or high school sneaking off to watch anime or drool over Legolas and getting to go play in these worlds in my head and do the thing that makes me come alive every day, that’s incredible.”

The Ducks bolstered their blueline Thursday night in anticipation of ending their long playoff drought, acquiring veteran defenseman John Carlson in a trade with the Washington Capitals.

In exchange for Carlson, the Ducks will send a conditional first-round pick (2026 or 2027 draft) and a third-round pick (2027) to Washington.

Carlson, who played an integral part of the Capitals’ 2018 Stanley Cup win and is a former Norris Trophy runner-up for the NHL’s top defenseman, should bring a veteran presence to a young Ducks team that is on pace to make the playoffs for the first time since 2017.

“John Carlson brings leadership, character, a high hockey IQ and a presence to our lineup,” Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek said in a statement. “We are very excited to add a Stanley Cup winner to complement our group and make a big push down the stretch.”

Set to become a free agent this offseason, Carlson had 10 goals and 46 points in 55 games with the Capitals this season. He led all Washington skaters in ice time, averaging more than 23 minutes per game.

Carlson, however, has not played since Feb. 5 because of a lower-body injury. It’s unclear when he might make his Ducks debut, but was practicing with the Capitals before the trade. When he does get into the lineup, he’ll join Jacob Trouba and Radko Gudas as part of a formidable right-side defensive trio for the Ducks.

In 1,143 career games over 17 seasons entirely with Washington, Carlson recorded 771 points (166 goals, 605 assists) — ranking him 24th all-time among NHL defensemen. He also had 78 points in 137 playoff games. A two-time All-Star, Carlson played for the U.S. at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games and in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. He also scored the winning goal for the U.S. in the 2010 World Junior Championship.

The Ducks are second in the Pacific Division and have won 13 of their last 16 games. They face the Montreal Canadiens on Friday and the St. Louis Blues on Sunday before embarking on a four-game Canadian road trip.

The Carlson deal was finalized roughly 14 hours before Friday’s NHL trade deadline at noon PST.

EastEnders have been using Nigel Bates in a dementia storyline, exploring the effects of the illness on those suffering from it and their loved ones, particularly those caring for them

BBC soap EastEnders has aired emotional scenes about Nigel Bates‘ dementia, as the fans become sure he will die soon. The character has been part of a “heartbreaking” dementia storyline that has highlighted the impact of the illness on those caring for a sick loved one.

In Thursday’s episode (March 5), Nigel (Paul Bradley) was thrown a going-away party at the Vic before moving to his new care home. While he was able to smile and laugh in the pub, as those around him reminisced, he was unable to remain completely in the present and struggled with his illness.

As he hopped in a taxi, Oscar Branning (Pierre Counihan-Moullier) noted that Nigel was unlikely to ever be back to Albert Square – and fans agree.

READ MORE: Danniella Westbrook’s surgery – everything she’s had done to her faceREAD MORE: Holby City legend to join EastEnders for role that will cause major drama for Walford

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When he arrived at the care home, Nigel became agitated and then unresponsive. His behaviour was deeply distressing for Phil (Steve McFadden), who had been caring for his friend. Breaking down in tears, Phil apologised to Nigel and gave his hand a squeeze, but Nigel did not move. As such, many fans think Nigel will die soon.

“I don’t know why, but I feel maybe next week, maybe Nigel’s final week,” one wrote. “I don’t know because seeing this episode made it feel like his time is near, and it’s so devastating and heartbreaking.”

Another added that Nigel’s unresponsive behaviour made it look like he was already dead. “Very much looked like he died at the end of the episode as he didn’t react to the door slamming or the card falling.”

Others shared that they thought this would become a euthanasia storyline. “I genuinely thought Phil was gonna suffocate Nigel OMG,” one wrote.

A second said: “For a minute there I thought Phil was gonna ease his pain by suffocating him by putting the jacket on him, but I’m glad it didn’t happen as it would have been even more heartbreaking.”

They later added that they loved a conversation between Yolande Trueman (Angela Wynter) and Nigel’s wife Julie Bates (Karen Henthorn) and felt this was leading towards Nigel’s death too: “I thought they were gonna go down the route of euthanasia.”

As part of Nigel’s dementia storyline, his daughter, Clare Bates (Gemma Bissix) has returned to the Square for a short stint. Clare is Nigel’s adoptive daughter. They became family in 1994 when he married her mother, and he continued to care for her after her mother died a year later.

Though Nigel and Clare both left the show shortly after, Clare made a comeback in 2008 without him, and she has made a return again. Her return was not such a happy one, as she had been estranged from her father, and he failed to recognise her for most of the episode. Eventually, Julie helped Nigel remember his daughter in a touching moment.

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The House of Pies, a Los Feliz institution, is bustling on a chilly January morning.

It wouldn’t be shocking if some of the patrons here for breakfast were casually chit-chatting about the cultural behemoth that “KPop Demon Hunters” has become. After all, the 2025 animated saga about three music stars fighting otherworldly foes is now the most-watched movie ever on Netflix; “Golden,” its showstopping track, has since become the first Korean pop song to ever win a Grammy.

But for Danya Jimenez, 29, who sits across from me sipping coffee, the reception to the movie she began writing on back in 2020 isn’t entirely surprising, but certainly delayed.

“When we first started working on it, I was like, ‘People are going to be obsessed with this. It’s going to be the best thing ever,’” she recalls. But as several years passed, and she and her writing partner and best friend Hannah McMechan, 30, moved on to other projects. They weren’t sure if “KPop” would ever see the light of day. Production for animation takes time.

It wasn’t until she learned that her Mexican parents were organically aware of the movie that Jimenez considered it could actually live up to the potential she initially had hoped for.

“Without me saying anything, my parents were like, ‘People are talking about this’ — like my dad’s co-workers or my aunt’s friends — that’s when I started to realize, ‘This might be something big,’” she says.

“But never in my life did I think it would be at this scale.”

“KPop Demon Hunters” is now nominated for two Academy Awards: animated feature and original song. And that’s on top of how ubiquitous the characters — Rumi, Mira and Zoey — already are.

“Everyone sends me photos of knockoff ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ dolls from across the border,” Jimenez says laughing. “My friend got me a shirt from Mexicali with the three girls, but they do not look anything like themselves. She even got my name on it, which was awesome.”

After graduating from Loyola Marymount University in 2018, Jimenez and McMechan quickly found their footing in the industry, as well as representation. But it was their still unproduced screenplay, “Luna Likes,” about a Mexican American teenage girl obsessed with the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain, that tangentially put them on the “KPop” path.

“Luna Likes” earned the pair a spot at the prestigious Sundance Screenwriters Lab, where Nicole Perlman, who co-wrote “Guardians of the Galaxy,” served as one of their advisors. Perlman, credited as a production consultant on “KPop,” thought they would be a good fit.

Jimenez didn’t see the connection between her R-rated comedy about a moody Mexican American teen and a PG animated feature set in the world of K-pop music, but the duo still pitched. Their idea more closely resembled an indie dramedy than an epic action flick.

“If [our version of ‘KPop’] were live-action, it would’ve been a million-dollar budget. It was the smallest movie ever. Our big finale was a pool party,” Jimenez says. “We had all of the girls and the boys with instruments, which obviously is not a thing in K-pop, and everyone was making out.”

Even though their original pitch wouldn’t work for the film, Maggie Kang, the co-director and also a co-writer, believed their voices as two young women who were best friends, roommates and creative collaborators could help the movie’s heroines feel more authentic.

“Maggie had already interviewed all of the more established writers, especially older men,” Jimenez says. “She knows the culture. She knew K-pop, she’s an animator. She just needed the girls’ voices to come through, so I think that’s why we got hired.”

Kang confirms this via email: “It’s always great to collaborate with writers who are the actual age of your characters! Hannah and Danya were exactly that,” she says. “They were very helpful in bringing a fresh, young voice to HUNTR/X.”

Neither Jimenez nor McMechan were K-pop fans at the time. As part of their research, they both started watching K-pop videos, but it was McMechan who got “sucked into the K-hole” first. Still, it didn’t take long until the video for BTS’ “Life Goes On” entranced Jimenez.

“K-pop is a river that you fall into, and it just takes you,” Jimenez says. BTS and Got7 are her favorite groups. For McMechan, the ensemble that captivates her most is Stray Kids.

In writing the trio of demon hunters, the co-writers modeled them after themselves. The characters’ propensity for ugly faces, silliness and a bit of grossness too, stems from the portrayals of girlhood and young womanhood that appeal to them. Jimenez, who says she was an angsty teen, most closely identifies with the rebellious Mira.

“I have a monotone vibe,” says Jimenez. “People always think that I’m a bitch just because I have a resting bitch face,” she says. “But as you can see in the movie, Mira cares so much about having everyone be really close. I feel like that’s how I’m with all my friends.”

Characters with strong personalities that are not simplistically likable feel the truest to Jimenez. In “Luna Likes,” the prickly protagonist is directly inspired by her experiences growing up, as well as the bond she shared with her dad over Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” show.

“There’s a pressure to show that Mexicans are nice people and we’re hard workers. I was like, ‘Let’s make her kind of bitchy and very flawed,’” Jimenez says about Luna. “She’s a teenager in America and she should be given all the same opportunities — and also the forgiveness for being an ass— and [as] selfish at that age as anybody else.”

Hannah McMechan, left, and Danya Jimenez, co-writers of “KPop Demon Hunters,” met in college.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Though their upbringings were markedly different, it was their shared comedic sensibilities that connected Jimenez and McMechan when they met in college. The two were close long before deciding to pen stories together. “Having a writing partner is the best. I feel bad for people who don’t have a writing partner, no offense to them,” says Jimenez.

McMechan explains that their writing partnership works because it’s grounded on true friendship. And she believes they would not have gotten this far without each other. While McMechan’s strong suit is looking at the bigger picture, Jimenez finds humor in the details.

“Danya is definitely funnier than me,” says McMechan. “It’s really hard to write comedy in dialogue versus comedy in a situation because if you’re putting the comedy in the dialogue, it can sound so forced and cringey. But she’s really good at making it sound natural but still really funny.”

Though she had been writing stories for herself as a teen, Jimenez didn’t consider it a career path until as a high schooler she watched the romantic comedy “No Strings Attached,” in which Ashton Kutcher plays a production assistant for a TV series.

“He is having a horrible time. But I was so obsessed with movies and TV, and I was like, ‘That looks incredible. I want to be doing what he’s doing,’” she recalls. “And my dad was like, ‘That’s a job.’”

Danya Jimenez grew up in Orange County.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

As an infant, Jimenez spent some time living in Tijuana, where her parents are from, until the family settled back in San Diego, where she was born. And when she was around 5 years old, Jimenez, an only child, and her parents relocated to Orange County. Until then, Jimenez mostly spoke Spanish, which made for a tricky transition when starting school.

“I knew English, but it just wasn’t a habit,” she recalls. “I would raise my hand and accidentally speak Spanish in class. My teachers would be like, ‘We’re worried about her vocabulary.’ That was always an issue, so it’s really funny that I turned out to be a writer.”

As she points out in her professional bio, it was movies and TV that helped with her English vocabulary, especially the Disney sitcom “Lizzie McGuire.”

Jimenez describes growing up in Orange County with few Latinos around outside of her family as an alienating experience. She admits to feeling great shame for some of her behaviors as a teenager afraid of being treated differently and desperate to fit in.

“I would speak Spanish to my mom like in a corner because I didn’t want everyone else to hear me speak Spanish,” Jimenez confesses. “If my mom pulled up to school to drop me off playing Spanish hits from the ‘80s or banda, I was like, ‘Can you turn it down please?’”

Like a lot of young Latinos, she’s now taking steps to connect with her heritage, and, in a way, atone for those moments where she let what others might think rob her of her pride.

“During the pandemic I cornered my grandma to make all of her recipes again so I could write them down,” she recalls. “Now I have them all written down on a website. Or if my mom corrects me for something that I’m saying in Spanish, I now listen.”

At the risk of angering her, Jimenez describes her mother as a “cool mom,” and compares her to Amy Poehler’s character in “Mean Girls.” Raised in a household without financial struggles, Jimenez doesn’t often relate to stories about Latinos in the U.S. that make it to film and TV. Her hope is to expand Latino storytelling beyond the tropes.

“That’s very important to me, to just tell Latino stories or Mexican stories in a way that’s just authentic to me and hopefully someone else is like, ‘Yes, that’s me,’” she says. “A lot of people have certain expectations for Latino stories that I’m not willing to compromise on.”

Though they still would like to make “Luna Likes” if given the chance, for now, Jimenez and McMechan will continue their rapid ascent.

They’re “goin’ up, up, up” because it is their “moment.” They recently wrapped the Apple TV show “Brothers” starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson that filmed in Texas. They are also writing the feature “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman” for Tim Burton to direct, with Margot Robbie in talks to star.

“I feel like I’ve just been operating in a state of shock for the past, I don’t know how many months since June,” says Jimenez in her signature deadpan affect. “But if I think about it too much, I’d be a nervous wreck.”

Mexican writer-director Michel Franco (“Memory”) explores dynamics of money, class and the border through the spiky, unsettling erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican ballet dancer and actor.

In the languidly paced movie, Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment with wielding the power at their fingertips against each other. The film examines the push-pull of attraction and rejection on a scope that’s both intimate and global, finding the uneasy space where the two meet.

Chastain stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco does not center on her experience, but that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we meet first escaping from the back of a box truck filled with migrants crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. He’s abandoned in San Antonio on a 100-degree day.

His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is the lap of luxury: a modernist San Francisco mansion where he makes himself at home and where he’s clearly been before. A talented ballet dancer who has already once been deported, he’s risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, though, as a high-profile figure, she’d rather keep her affair with Fernando under wraps. He’s her dirty little secret but he’s also a human being who refuses to be kept in the shadows.

As Jennifer and Fernando attempt to navigate what it looks like for them to be together, it seems that larger forces will shatter their connection. In reality, the only real danger is each other.

The storytelling logic of “Dreams” is predicated on watching these characters move through space, the way we watch dancers do. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose the wildly varying experiences of Fernando and Jennifer — he almost dies of thirst and heat stroke; she arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but both enter empty homes alone, melancholy. During a rift in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel, drinking red wine out of plastic cups with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer’s calls, while she eats alone in her darkened dining room, sipping out of crystal.

These comparisons aren’t exactly nuanced but they are stark and, for most of the film, Franco just asks us to watch them move together and apart, in a strange, avoidant pas de deux. Often dwarfed by architecture, their distinctive bodies in space are more important than the sparse dialogue that only serves to fill in crucial gaps in storytelling.

Cinematographer Yves Cape captures it all in crisp, saturated images. The lack of musical score (beyond diegetic music in the ballet scenes) contributes to the dry, flat affect and tone, as these characters enact increasing cruelties — both emotional and physical — upon each other as a means of trying to contain each other, until it escalates into something truly dark and disturbing.

Franco loses the plot of “Dreams” in the third act. What is a rather staid drama about the weight of social expectations on a relationship becomes a dramatically unexpected game of vengeance as Jennifer and Fernando grasp at any power they have over the other. She fetishizes him and he returns the favor, violently.

Ultimately, Franco jettisons his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling only icky. These events aren’t illuminating and feel instead like a bleak betrayal. The circumstances of the story might be timely, but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and liberty. Anything it suggests we already know.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

“The Gray House,” a limited series now streaming on Prime Video, purports to tell the fact-based story of Elizabeth Van Lew, who spied for the Union in the Civil War while living in the midst of Southern society in Richmond, Va. And in very broad terms it does, though it fills up the space within those outlines with an army of imagined details and melodramatic plots and subplots.

It is not the first work for the screen that betrays history by attempting to make it more exciting than it already is, and if you go in ready not to wonder or care what did or did not actually happen, and which characters are real or invented, you may make out alright. (If you do care, there is Gerri Willis’ 2025 volume “Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster: The Untold Story of the Abolitionist Southern Belle Who Helped Win the Civil War.”)

So I will not ring a bell every time the miniseries, which admittedly bills itself as “inspired by a true story,” diverts from the record, even though in my head it may be clanging.

It’s July 4, 1860, nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. Elizabeth (Daisy Head) lives in a mansion in Richmond with her mother Eliza (Mary-Louise Parker), and the two are throwing a party. Guests, including the historical Swedish novelist and social reformer Fredrika Bremer (Oxana Moravec), congressman Sherrard Clemens (Ionut Grama), Virginia Gov. Henry Wise (Mark Perry) and his awful son Obie (Blake Patrick Anderson), unload expository dialogue and provide a primer for anyone not acquainted with the roots of the Civil War. Meanwhile, a runaway slave shows up out back, pursued by hounds, having heard that the Van Lew house is the place to run for help. The women, who are against secession and for abolition but are practiced in the art of deceiving their neighbors, are involved with the Underground Railroad in some way that’s not exactly clear.

Among their servants — the Van Lew slaves were (secretly) freed upon the death of Elizabeth’s father — are head porter Isham, played by Ben Vereen, who it is a pure pleasure to see back on screen, and Mary Jane (Amethyst Davis). A well-educated, determined young woman who is just back from Liberia, which did not suit her — she calls it a “tricky little way of ridding America of free Blacks” — the series gives her a lot of agency and makes her a virtual partner in the spy ring. White and Black, they live as much like a family as is possible when some people are labor and others are management and it’s the antebellum, then the wartime South.

Also involved in Elizabeth’s tradecraft are Scottish baker Thomas McNiven (Christopher McDonald) and Clara Parish (Hannah James), a beautiful prostitute who dreams “of Bronte’s moors” and gets, of all things, a big musical number in an out-of-place Western saloon, like Marlene Dietrich in “Destry Rides Again.” (The saloon is a standing set at Castel Film Studios in Romania, where the production was based; their backlot Western street, too, makes an implausible appearance.)

Ben Vereen as Isham Worthy, a porter in the Van Lew home.

(Bogdan Merlusca/Prime Video)

Out of the loop are Elizabeth’s brother, John (Ewan Miller), whose heart is in the right place, but who’s married to Laurette (Catherine Hannay), whose heart is not. An avaricious, envious flirt on the undisguised lookout for something better, she is angry that John wouldn’t use slave labor to build their house. She’s Scarlett O’Hara, minus the intelligence and charm.

Calling roll on the enemy, we find present Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Sam Trammell), in whose house — the eponymous Gray House — Mary Jane will be embedded, with a cocked ear and a photographic memory, to gather intel; Secretary of War (and then State) Judah P. Benjamin (Rob Morrow), who has a thing for Clara, to whom he opines on property rights while they share a bathtub; and a pip-squeak John Wilkes Booth (Charles Craddock), popping in and out no reason, unless it’s to foreshadow the death of Lincoln (who makes a rearview cameo), or just because everybody’s heard of him. Below them, but more in the action, are the nasty, thuggish Sheriff Stokely Reeves (Paul Anderson) and slave hunter Bully Lumpkin (Robert Knepper); and while thuggery and violence were endemic in a racist South, caricature and cliche do your history lesson no favors, however valuable it is.

Because Hollywood hates, let’s call it a love vacuum when it comes to screen heroines, Elizabeth will find herself the object of not one, not two, but (at least) three admirers, who prize her brains and spirit and talent for conversation. (She is no frilly, fizzy, fuzzy Southern belle, like the mean girls around her sister-in-law.) There is Hamton Arsenault (Colin Morgan), a sort of Rhett Butler lite, visiting from New Orleans with a huge live alligator, because I guess that’s something you could manage in 1860 just to make a splash at a party a thousand miles away. Capt. William Lounsbury (Colin O’Donoghue) is a dashing Union officer, escaping a Confederate prison, who passes through the Van Lew house on the way to freedom; they click together like Legos. Finally, there’s shy puppy dog Erasmus Ross (Joshua McGuire), who works at the Van Lew’s hardware store and will later have a post at a prison for captured Union soldiers, which the Van Lews will turn to their advantage.

“The Gray House” isn’t all bad, and its intentions are good, but it’s dramatically predictable and at eight episodes, some over an hour, goes on much, much longer than it needs to, letting scenes play out past profitability and wasting time on extraneous subplots involving minor characters — and minor minor characters — that do nothing to enrich the fabric of the show. A duel between two characters with no significant connection to the rest of the story exists here seemingly just because their historical counterparts did fight one, and gives the filmmakers the chance to add a duel — on horseback, like jousting with guns — to the show.

Parker is always fine, though the part requires a bit too much Southern breathiness. Davis and Head make strong impressions, masking the pedestrian, sometimes cornball dialogue. (The miniseries was written by Leslie Greif and Darrell Fetty, who collaborated on “Hatfields & McCoys”, with an undiscernable assist from John Sayles.) Keith David, who plays real-life activist minister Henry H. Garnet, gives a seven-minute speech on education as if he’s performing a Shakespearean monologue, after which he faces down a murderous sheriff like he’s Shaft. It’s a high point of the series, and the one scene I was happy to see go long.

Directed by Roland Joffé, who four decades ago was Oscar-nominated for “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” the production is a mixed bag; much care has been lavished on the costumes; the crowd scenes are well populated; printed material is done really well. (It matters.) Battle scenes — including Bull Run, where picnicking tourists are accurately shown in attendance — are convincingly rendered. But Romania, whether on or off the studio lot, only occasionally musters a decent impression of 19th century Virginia, reminding you, as “The Gray House” often does, that this is only a movie.

We made it! After this weekend, when the Producers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild hand out their highly predictive precursors, the final shape of the Oscar race should be (reasonably) clear — and nominees worn out by months of campaigning will be breathing a sigh of relief.

Before I share highlights from this week’s issue, one programming note: This will be my last letter from the editor until our inaugural Cannes issue drops in May. (Don’t worry, I will be plenty busy in the interim catching up on this year’s top Emmy contenders.)

Thanks as always for following along, and may you triumph in your Oscar pool!

Cover story: Rose Byrne

(Ryan Pfluger / For The Times)

Times columnist Mary McNamara and I don’t agree on everything, but we do agree on this: “Damages” deserves to be ranked alongside “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” in any discussion of the Golden Age of TV.

That’s thanks in one part to a gripping flash-forward narrative structure now so common it could be considered a cliché, and in another to Glenn Close’s indelible performance as ruthless litigator Patty Hewes. But it’s also a testament to the multifaceted talents of Rose Byrne, who went “toe-to-toe” with Close in what would become her breakthrough role — and then confidently pivoted to projects like “Insidious,” “Bridesmaids” and “Spy.”

“Byrne is something of a creative chameleon, moving easily from drama to comedy to horror, film to television to stage and back again,” McNamara writes in this week’s cover story. “In many ways, her gut-wrenching, darkly funny performance as a woman pushed beyond all endurance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a culmination of all the characters she brought to life before it.”

Inside Warner Bros.’ dominant Oscar haul

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Whether you come down on the side of “Sinners” or “One Battle After Another” in the best picture race may be perfect fodder for debate with friends over a few small beers, but for Warner Bros. executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy it would be akin to choosing a favorite child. After all, both projects emerged from the pair’s desire, as contributor Gregory Ellwood writes, to make WB “a destination where filmmakers of all varieties, including auteurs, bring their projects for ‘white glove’ treatment.”

As De Luca explains, “Everything was original once… If you don’t refresh the coffers with new IP to create new franchises, at some point you get to Chapter 10 or 11 and people start to move on.”

The many faces of ‘The Secret Agent’

(Ryan Pfluger/For The Times)

The moment Tânia Maria arrives onscreen as Dona Sebastiana in “The Secret Agent,” you can’t help but ask yourself, “Who is that?!” (Star Wagner Moura had the same reaction.) But the real feat casting director Gabriel Domingues pulls off in the Oscar-nominated Brazilian thriller is to make you ask yourself the same question, over and over, every time a new character appears.

How did Domingues find a range of actors to represent the country’s endless diversity? It’s part of his process, writes contributor Carlos Aguilar: “He prides himself on doing the shoe-leather work of looking for fresh, compelling faces in cities where others might not think to look — those without a prominent arts scene, for instance.”

More stories from our Feb. 26 issue

For casting director Gabriel Domingues, putting together the ensemble of “The Secret Agent” meant materializing characters inspired by director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s recollections.

“It’s not that he was showing us a picture and saying, ‘They must look like this.’ They were ideas of memories that could change,” Domingues says of the Brazilian period thriller about a father on the run during an interview at The Times newsroom. One of the nominees for this year’s inaugural Academy Award for casting, Domingues appreciates how politically charged Mendonça Filho’s films are. His narratives are often fertile ground for an eclectic mix of performers.

And there are no throwaway roles in “The Secret Agent”: “Even the small characters represent ideas about Brazilian life and its contradictions,” Domingues adds.

To honor his large cast, a “panorama” of his country’s people, Mendonça Filho includes a montage at the end of the film in which each actor is acknowledged individually. The director thinks of this as the cinematic equivalent of a curtain call or final bow at the end of a stage production.

“Gabriel tries to find an interesting mix of experienced actors and people that we can discover,” says producer Emilie Lesclaux about Domingues, with whom she’s worked on multiple projects. He first collaborated with Mendonça Filho and Lesclaux on “Aquarius” as a casting assistant.

Domingues believes working on “Aquarius” was instrumental in developing his casting method, which involves searching for the least obvious option to cast the character. He prides himself on doing the shoe-leather work of looking for fresh, compelling faces in cities where others might not think to look — those without a prominent arts scene, for instance.

Gabriel Leone as Bobbi/Abdias  (Victor Juca)

Hermila Guedes as Claudia  (Victor Juca)

Luciano Chirolli as Henrique Ghirotti  (Victor Juca)

Roberio Diogenes as Euclides Cavalcanti  (Victor Juca)

Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana  (Victor Juca)

Joalisson Cunha as Frentista  (Victor Juca)

Isabel Zuaa as Tereza Victoria  (Victor Juca)

Kaiony Venancio as Vilmar  (Victor Juca)

That’s not to say the entire cast was discovered. Mendonça Filho had lead Wagner Moura in mind from the outset, while others sprung to mind as he wrote the screenplay: Maria Fernanda Cândido, a famous soap opera actor, as a crucial ally to Moura’s character; and the late Udo Kier, who had previously appeared in the director’s blood-soaked film “Bacurau,” as a German Jewish immigrant who lived through World War II.

The filmmaker admits that envisioning parts with a specific person in mind is “dangerous.” “I can write a character thinking of you, but I never know if you will want to make the film,” says Mendonça Filho. “And I grow attached to the image.”

Among the other supporting roles, the most challenging to cast, the team agrees, was that of Euclides, the sleazy police chief. Though the character is “repulsive,” it also required an edge of charisma to make him more emotionally layered. Eventually, they came across actor Robério Diógenes. “Robério has studied the clown art in the theater, and he’s a very funny guy, so he adds a component of ridiculousness to this character,” Domingues says.

For Vilmar, an impoverished man hired as a subcontractor for a murder, Mendonça Filho had in mind a real-life contract killer he’d seen in a 1970s TV program. The actor had to convey a certain ambiguity not often afforded to people of a lower social class. There’s no doubt Vilmar is acting out of necessity, but he is not entirely without agency since he negotiates his payment. Domingues found the ideal embodiment of this complex character in Kaiony Venâncio, an actor from the city of Natal who had mostly worked in short films.

Then there’s the scene-stealing Tânia Maria, who plays the endearing, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana. The 79-year-old talent first appeared in “Bacurau” as an extra. “I just could not help thinking of her,” says Mendonça Filho about casting her in his latest film. “I even pre-ad-libbed many of her lines knowing what she might say.”

Before finding her way onto the screen, Tânia Maria has long made a living as an artisan handcrafting rugs. “I never thought about being an actress. I only thought about sewing,” she says with an endearing smile. “All of this came as a surprise.”

Igor de Araujo as Sergio  (Victor Juca)

Joao Vitor Silva as Haroldo  (Victor Juca)

Robson Andrade as Clovis  (Victor Juca)

Maria Fernanda Candido as Elza/Sara Gerber  (Victor Juca)

Alice Carvalho as Fatima  (Victor Juca)

Thomas Aquino as Valdemar  (Victor Juca)

Licinio Januario as Antonio  (Victor Juca)

Udo Kier as Hans  (Victor Juca)

And though she’s still sewing, her acting prospects look bright. She’s already appeared in another film, “Yellow Cake,” premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival this month. That Tânia Maria also recently starred in humorous local commercials for Burger King and Heineken is proof of her current status in Brazilian pop culture — as are the Dona Sebastiana costumes that have become popular during this year’s Carnival.

“I can’t go out on the street without people stopping me. They ask me for autographs, for photos, they want to talk to me, they ask me questions,” she says in Portuguese via an interpreter while on a video call from her home. “I make time for everyone, and I’m enjoying all of it.”

Undaunted by what she calls the most challenging aspect of acting — memorizing the lines — Tânia Maria is eager to continue exploring this unexpected new facet. “I don’t want to stop because I’m not old! I’m waiting for more invitations to move forward in acting,” she says.

The success many of the actors have found thanks to “The Secret Agent” very much pleases the filmmakers, but it also has a major downside.

“That’s all that we want for the people that we work with, that the film is good for them and their career,” says Lesclaux. “But for us, it also makes things more complicated for the next film because we will want to work with them, and they might not be available.”

The 2026 original song contenders come from deep inside the characters singing them: a simple man wistfully looking back on his ordinary life; a budding bluesman with talent to burn down the house; a 17-time Oscar nominee; a demon-hunting K-pop star channeling the real-life singer-songwriter behind her; and a joyous expression of life from inside a documentary’s main “character,” a retirement home for musicians.

‘Dear Me’ from ‘Diane Warren: Relentless’

Music and lyrics by Diane Warren

Diane Warren in “Diane Warren: Relentless.”

(Don Holtz)

When 17-time Oscar nominee Diane Warren agreed to be in a documentary about her life, she found herself back in her childhood home in Van Nuys — specifically the bathroom where she wrote songs as an angsty teen.

“The acoustics in that bathroom were always great,” she says. “It was cool to go back and look at the bedroom window I used to sneak out of. I’m always connected to that 14-year-old me, with a guitar my dad bought me.”

Inspired by the documentary’s examination of her troubled youth, Warren wrote an “It gets better” ballad sung by Kesha: “Dear me, it’s gonna be all right, all right / Trust me, all of the pain is gonna fade.”

“I get notes from all ages; the song makes them feel like they could hug the little kid inside them,” says Warren. “It’s a love song to your younger self.”

‘Golden’ from ‘KPop Demon Hunters’

Music and lyrics by Ejae, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seon and Teddy Park

A scene from “KPop Demon Hunters.”

(Netflix via Associated Press)

Though “Golden” went to No. 1 and has been winning awards, singer and co-writer Ejae still connects “one hundred million percent” to its painful roots in her own, frustrated K-pop dreams.

She related to the film’s protagonist, Rumi, a monster-fighting singer who is secretly part monster herself. “She has this side that she’s so ashamed of, that she was born with. I struggled with my own demons that I was ashamed of, growing up in the K-pop industry, [harshly critiqued for] my physical appearance, my voice, my personality.

“Even when writing ‘Golden,’ things were just not happening. It was a really bad time.”

Yet the hit is a catchy K-pop banger.

“It was very cathartic,” she says. “I remember crying while recording the demo. I was desperate.

“Now when I sing it, it’s a different feeling. I was able to reach a dream, and it makes me feel like this is who I was meant to be.”

‘I Lied to You’ from ‘Sinners’

Music and lyrics by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson

Miles Caton, center, in “Sinners.”

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” features a central moment of musical ecstasy. Emerging bluesman Sammie plays a song he wrote as a confession to his pastor father, a paean to the music he loves. As the juke joint crowd responds, he loses himself in the timeless transcendence artists hope for.

Co-writer Ludwig Göransson says, “It doesn’t happen very often, but you have those experiences when you really are getting into the music and time and space disappears. Ryan’s not a musician, but it was written like he’s been in that position.”

In cosmic communion, practitioners of Black music from many eras appear to Sammie, the joint’s roof combusting in his mind. Göransson assisted in the Dolby Atmos mix, moving the music and sound around spatially as the camera travels.

Co-writer Raphael Saadiq says, “Sammie’s father felt secular music was devil music. Even today, you have people who go to church who don’t listen to the blues [for that reason], but deep down inside, they love it because it’s something we inherited from our ancestors.”

‘Sweet Dreams of Joy’ from ‘Viva Verdi!’

Music and lyrics by Nicholas Pike

Milan’s Casa Verdi, a retirement home for musicians depicted in “Viva Verdi!”

(Viva Verdi! LLC)

Even those who know little about opera have heard of Giuseppe Verdi. What many don’t know is one of his most enduring accomplishments is Casa Verdi — a retirement home for musicians. Yvonne Russo’s documentary “Viva Verdi!” captures the vibrant life inside its walls, expressed in the aria “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” sung by soprano Ana María Martínez and composed by Nicholas Pike.

The filmmakers “sent me this 12-minute assembly, kind of like a teaser, and that’s all I saw,” says Pike. “The passion, the vitality of these residents, the mentoring of young, up-and-coming artists … I went over to the piano and wrote the song.”

He says the whole thing took about a day to craft, with its contemporary piano figures and classical vocals, imbued with the vivaciousness of Casa Verdi’s residents.

He wanted to capture the footage’s “energy and life and hope. We’ve all been to retirement homes; they can be pretty down places. This is 180 degrees from that.”

‘Train Dreams’ from ‘Train Dreams’

Music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner; lyrics by Nick Cave

Joel Edgerton in “Train Dreams.”

(Netflix)

When “Train Dreams” star Joel Edgerton called Nick Cave to work with composer Bryce Dessner on a song for the film, the postpunk poet and art rocker was on holiday, avoiding the “attendant agony” of songwriting. But Denis Johnson’s book happened to be a favorite of Cave’s.

Edgerton sent him the film. Cave says, “I sat up in bed and watched it with Bryce’s gorgeous score and fell asleep and had a kind of fever dream with all the images of this extraordinary film, and woke up with the lyrics fully formed, which is extremely unusual for me.”

He went to the hotel’s breakfast room, where there was a piano. “It all just sort of poured out of me. The melody and the lyrics fit perfectly to Bryce’s score.”

The song expresses “the inarticulate wonder at the world that the lead character has. There’s this chordal thing after the refrain, that rises up — an expression of that wonder, rising out of the grief.

“‘This has been going on for years … I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.’”

A one-size-fits-all sartorial approach is out of the question for the showmen of “Sinners,” “Hamnet,” “Frankenstein” and “Marty Supreme.” But whether the arena is theater, music, science or sports, all wear garments that accentuate their emotional states and prodigious talents — and leave an enduring mark. Here, Oscar-nominated costume designers Ruth E. Carter (“Sinners”), Malgosia Turzanska (“Hamnet”), Kate Hawley (“Frankenstein”) and Miyako Bellizzi (“Marty Supreme”) discuss defining menswear statements with The Envelope.

In Carter’s third collaboration with Ryan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan’s sharply dressed twins Smoke and Stack return to the Mississippi Delta in 1932 to open a juke joint, tapping their gifted blues musician cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), to perform. “You see this style that [old blues players] embodied, whether it’s two-tone shoes, the hat, vest, shirts; all of that was laced into the storytelling,” says Carter. He might be a preacher’s son, but Sammie wears his passion on his blues-infused clothing in the record-breaking “Sinners.” “The vest is patched to show the wear from the guitar strap.”

Before the night goes to vampire hell, all eyes are on Sammie in earthy and gold tones as he sings “I Lied to You.” Artists spanning centuries and continents (including an electric-guitar-playing rocker and a Zaouli dancer) add to the mesmerizing sequence before returning to Sammie. “When we come back to him, we’re coming back to his own force and look,” Carter says.

A sketch of Sammie’s bluesman-inspired costume in “Sinners.”

(Ruth E. Carter)

A final scene set in 1992 shows Sammie (played by musician Buddy Guy) still beguiling audiences. Carter incorporates Guy’s real-life signature polka dots to highlight “this is a real story of the blues, and this is a real bluesman.” Stack’s authentic Coogi sweater (a nod to Biggie Smalls) contrasts with Sammie’s classic tailoring, which doubles as a memorial to his other cousin: “The color blue was an homage to Smoke and the flat cap.”

Clothing is also for remembrance in Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” in which a grieving William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns to a meaningful shade in paying tribute to his son during the inaugural run of “Hamlet” at the Globe Theatre in London. “Will, in my head, was imagining, remembering and holding on to the memory of Hamnet,” Turzanska says. “And in a super crude, simplified way, putting the paint and the colors that he remembered onto Hamlet’s character with those brushstrokes.”

Turzanska constructed the players’ costumes from raw linen, using slightly enlarged, period-accurate shapes combined with contemporary latex paint. Using this stage language, Hamlet’s (Noah Jupe) jerkin is “quilted and painted flat,” to conjure Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe): “It was a memory of the vertical stripes.”

There are echoes among the costumes for William Shakespeare, Hamlet and Hamnet in Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes for “Hamnet.”

(Malgosia Turzanska)

Offstage, growing slashes in Will’s leather doublets depict “emotional turmoil.” Still, his turn as Hamlet’s murdered father (the Ghost) is the most overt example. The off-white cloak caked in clay is deliberately drained of all color. Turzanska tested the symbolic shroud (“You put this little harness on”) to ensure Mescal could move freely. Catharsis comes after Will exits the play: “The clay is cracking and falling off. Finally, when he washes it off, we see him break down for the first time and actually cry.”

Not every stage has a paying audience. In Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) reanimates a corpse during a disciplinary hearing demonstration. Clad in red, white and black, the renegade scientist’s sartorial inspiration is not bound to a single era.

“That was the first note from Guillermo [about Victor]. He goes, ‘Dandy, rock star. Look at David Bowie. Look at Prince,” says Hawley. “When we started talking with Oscar, he came in with his Prince stuff. When you look at his performance, you see all those subtleties, the physicality, the swagger.” Piping on the waistcoat is “a kick” to stand out against judges in black.

Hawley embraces “wonderful peacock” 1850s menswear shapes: Victor’s puffed-out chest accentuates the “wasp waist” likening him to a matador. An exaggerated period heel adds flair. “Shoes are what root the actor to the ground and their character,” Hawley says. “It elevates every gesture from there.”

Victor Frankenstein’s costumes in “Frankenstein” were inspired by musicians like David Bowie.

(Kate Hawley)

“Marty Supreme’s” Bellizzi is equally mindful of footwear. Bellizzi “worked with Keds to find the shape” resembling a narrow 1950s sneaker for Timothée Chalamet to wear as ambitious table tennis player Marty Mauser. “When he was training, I would give him a few different sneakers to see what looked good but also what felt good,” says Bellizzi. “Because he had to wear them all day and play in them.”

Marty switches from a sedate black polo shirt and high-waisted wool pants while playing at Wembley in London to an eye-catching pink satin set on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters during a lighthearted interlude in Josh Safdie’s propulsive comedy-drama. “We overexaggerated the pants and the sleeves in the body so it is big and flowy,” says Bellizzi.

By the time Marty arrives in Japan, his everyday suit “has been through the wringer.” Luckily, a rigged ping-pong exhibition match allows Marty to embrace his theatrical talents. “It was an opportunity to show him as someone else. He’s undercover,” says Bellizzi. “He has the cap and the jumper.” Ever the showman, Marty relishes ditching the pretense and his wardrobe onstage, embracing his competitive streak. “He turns it into a bigger situation than it should have been, and maybe part of the surprise is that he’s derobing,” Bellizzi says. “It shows how much passion comes out.” Across venues and centuries, each man’s attire is ovation-worthy.

The cast of “Scrubs” knows that the show’s creator, Bill Lawrence, has a habit of building communities with his series, which include “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking.” But the “Scrubs” crew knows they are the closest.

“Since I work on all those shows, I can say that we’re the tightest-knit group,” says Zach Braff on a video call with his fellow fake doctors Sarah Chalke and Donald Faison. “We vacation together.”

Lawrence, just a day later, has to concede that Braff has a point. “It’s annoying because I have to admit that they are right,” he says. “We’ve stayed the tightest because we all still spend way too much time together.”

And now the gang is back together for a new, nine-episode season of the beloved series premiering Feb. 25 on ABC, and the next day on Hulu. When “Scrubs” debuted in 2001, narrator J.D. (Braff), his best friend Turk (Faison) and on-again, off-again love interest Elliot (Chalke) were interns at Sacred Heart Hospital. Now, J.D. is a concierge doctor, while Turk and Elliot have advanced to leadership positions at Sacred Heart. There’s a new batch of interns, a new cheery hospital representative (Vanessa Bayer) whose job involves making sure no one gets offended, and a new doctor (Joel Kim Booster) who is not too fond of J.D. But there are also other familiar faces including John C. McGinley as J.D.’s begrudging mentor Dr. Cox and Judy Reyes as nurse Carla, who also happens to be Turk’s wife.

“Scrubs” then and now: Sarah Chalke, Zach Braff and Donald Faison in the original series, left, and in the ABC revival. (Chris Haston/NBC) (Brian Bowen Smith/Disney)

In the Season 8 finale — before the show reset with a medical school setting — J.D., always prone to elaborate fantasy sequences, sees a vision of how his life is going to turn out. His reality doesn’t exactly resemble that.

“We say midlife crisis or whatever, but it’s a time of questioning, a time where you take stock of your life,” says showrunner Aseem Batra. “That’s really a cool time to catch up with our characters because when we saw them last, they were in their quarter life.”

Batra herself has followed a similar path to the characters. After working as an assistant at ABC, her first writing gig was on “Scrubs.” Now she’s in a position of authority. “Truly, it was the best job I had and it was my first job and I’m doing it again out of pure love,” she says. (Longtime “Scrubs” writer Tim Hobert was originally announced as co-showrunner but departed the project.)

Lawrence, who serves as executive producer on the new incarnation, can also see a parallel between his path and that of his fictional creations. “I’m only good at writing about stuff that’s at least tangentially part of my life and the idea that of those young goofballs who are the students now being the teachers, it’s very much part of my life right now,” he says.

“Scrubs” creator Bill Lawrence has handed the reins to Aseem Batra, who is the showrunner of the revival. “Truly, it was the best job I had and it was my first job and I’m doing it again out of pure love,” she says.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Still, Lawrence says the reason the revival of the show was able to work is because of the closeness of the original cast. Faison and Braff are still constantly collaborating whether that’s on a podcast or commercials, and even though she’s decamped from Los Angeles to Canada, Chalke makes a point to keep in touch. On a boisterous Zoom call, we spoke about returning to their beloved characters.

What were your reactions coming back to this world?

Donald Faison: Please. Please. Revive it. Do me that solid and revive it.

Sarah Chalke: I manifested it. A couple years ago, I was like, “Oh, I miss ‘Scrubs.’ I want to do a comedy like ‘Scrubs’ that shoots in Vancouver, and then it all happened.”

Zach Braff: To be honest, I was very surprised when it actually started happening that ABC was going to put it in prime time. I thought it might be something on Hulu. That felt like a giant audience with Hulu the next day and a really big scale and really a belief in the project. That was really exciting.

Why do you think the show’s legacy is so strong that there is that belief?

Braff: I think that it’s Bill’s unique mix of comedy and pathos and emotion and fantasy. It’s such a unique recipe. But in execution, as he did with the first pilot, it was undeniable. It was so groundbreaking at the time. No one had done that in the network space. It was also at a time when there was no streaming. So, the show was on at 9:30 and Bill was trying to push what you could still do on network [television]. That’s why it was a more risqué version of what we’re doing now. I think now the goal was — well, there’s streaming for that. What’s a show that we can have on at 8 that pairs with “Abbott Elementary” that parents can watch with their kids? Maybe some jokes will fly over the kids’ heads, but it’s not trying to compete with what people are doing on streaming.

What do you remember about getting cast? You were all in your 20s.

Faison: I was the oldest one. Still the oldest one. I remember how big of a deal it was. This was the pilot of the season. I remember everybody and their mama was talking about how great the script was and how they wanted to be on the show. I remember my agent telling me, “This is a big one. The creator of the show really likes you. Let’s see what you can do.”

Chalke: I didn’t know this until two days ago. Our casting director came up to set to visit, and she said I was the first person to audition on the first morning of casting. In the character description, it said she moves and talks at a faster pace than normal humans. And in every single job, I’ve been told, “Slow down.” It felt like the luckiest thing; I’ll never forget when Bill called me and said that I got it and I truly couldn’t believe it. And the experience far exceeded any expectation I could have had about what it was going to be.

When I think back on it, what I remember is what that felt like to be at work every day, genuinely laughing so hard to the point where it would get late at night and there was one sound that Zach and Donald could make that would make me laugh.

Sarah Chalke on being cast in “Scrubs”: “I’ll never forget when Bill called me and said that I got it and I truly couldn’t believe it. And the experience far exceeded any expectation I could have had about what it was going to be.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

What was the sound?

Faison: It’s almost like a fart.

Braff: No, it’s not a fart.

Faison: I’m not trying to make a fart joke. But do you know how when you fart, it always sounds like a question mark. So, that’s the sound.

Braff: Esther, do not use this, please. It’s a high-pitched noise like this [does noise]. We would do it quietly enough that no one would hear we were doing it. And then she would break down laughing and ruin the take and we’d be like, “Sarah, what are you doing? It’s late. We want to go home.”

Zach, what were your initial thoughts about the project?

Braff: I was waiting tables at a French-Vietnamese restaurant called Le Colonial at Beverly and Robertson [in L.A.]. And I had to wear a tunic, which I put into “Garden State.” I’d been auditioning for so many things and not really getting much traction in the sitcom space, but I read this and I thought it was so funny. I was like, “Oh, I think I could really sell this because I find it so funny.”

How did you know the chemistry between the three of you was going to work?

Braff: When we were shooting the pilot, I was just like, “Wow. I really love these people.” I was obsessed with Sarah. I thought Donald was the funniest person I’d ever met. And then Bill was legitimately the funniest person I’ve ever met. I just felt in really good hands.

Chalke: We were all so excited to be there and we’d just hang out and watch the other scenes that we weren’t in. And I remember just being by the monitor, watching everybody else work and just being so blown away.

Braff: We would hang out after we were wrapped, which Sarah still does occasionally. This time Donald came early because there’s this really weird coffee robot in the production office that Donald seems to think is amazing coffee. So, I caught him a few times coming in early for the coffee robot.

Faison: That’s not why I came in early. I was notoriously late and unprepared the first go of “Scrubs.” I heard Tom Hanks talking about how he was a young actor and a very established actor kept forgetting their lines. And the director finally goes, “Ah, come on, come on guys. Three things. Show up early, know the text, have an idea. Let’s take 10,” and walks away. And Tom Hanks goes, “Oh, if that’s what it takes, I can do that s—.” So, I took that to heart and this is the second opportunity.

Braff: I thought it was the coffee robot.

Zach Braff on his co-stars: “When we were shooting the pilot, I was just like, ‘Wow. I really love these people.’ I was obsessed with Sarah. I thought Donald was the funniest person I’d ever met.” (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

But Sarah would hang out after you wrapped?

Chalke: We are all executive producers on this. Zach is producing and directing and editing and writing and doing all of the things, and that’s been really neat to watch. I legitimately do want to learn. Obviously, there’s a balance of that with also going back into work full-time and having two kids.

Braff: Sarah gave me this whole speech at the top of the show. She’s like, “Hey, I really do want to learn this stuff. I want to sit by your director’s chair. I want to ask you questions. I want to learn to genuinely [executive produce], genuinely direct.” And I was like, “Great.” The first week I was like, “All right. Sarah, we’re going on a big tech scout. It’s probably going to be about…”

Chalke: “In a van for seven hours.”

Braff: I go, “You’re going to learn more on the tech scout than you could in film school.” And she’s like, “No, I won’t be able to do that.” And then by the end of the nine episodes, Sarah was like, “I think my EP thing is morale.”

Faison: I want to piggyback on something Sarah said though. Zach has done a lot, these nine episodes. For this revival, he’s done so much and has worked so hard on this. And that’s made us all feel very safe and secure also because we know we have the No. 1 guy on the call sheet who cares about the show completely putting in 100% to make sure that we’re coming out the gate with something very, very, very, very strong and undeniable for the fans.

What were your conversations about where your characters would be after all these years?

Braff: One of the big conversations we had was we wanted to reground the show because the show got really broad over the years and we wanted to dial it back and go back to where we started, where it exists in a real place. We have the luxury of the fantasies where we can be super silly. And obviously, we dip our toe over the line sometimes and stuff is a little broad. But for the most part, the new show is back to Season 1 and grounded again.

As we all know, especially when you reach 50 years old, a lot of things in life don’t turn out the way you hope they would. And that’s why we opened the show with J.D. living this fantasy that he is this heroic trauma ER guy when in fact he’s fixing toes in the suburbs. Also, I think with regard to me and Donald, [Lawrence] said, “I want them to be silly as those two guys are in real life, but … when they drop in and they’re teachers, they’re really good teachers.”

Donald Faison on returning for the revival: “When we did the table read, I laughed so hard when the first voice-over kicked in, when Zach read the voice-over.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Was it easy to fall back into your rhythms?

Faison: When we did the table read, I laughed so hard when the first voice-over kicked in, when Zach read the voice-over.

Braff: The whole room did. It was really funny because no one had heard me do that voice in 20 years.

Chalke: One of the coolest things that helped with the show was Bill would just write to everybody’s strengths or write to their quirks or write to their personalities and weave it in. That happened this season, but it happened all through the first eight years. And so, to a certain extent, the lines blurred sometimes between ourselves and our characters. So, stepping back into them, there’s a reason why it felt so comfortable.

Braff: Sarah is a fast-talking klutz.

Chalke: I am. We met all the interns and Zach said, “So, guys, Chalke’s going to come in every day and something’s going to be broken. Every day there’s going to be a story.” And then I proceeded the very next day, which was the day before filming, to fall and break my finger. So, I did have to come in on the first day and say, “So, I broke my finger.”

How did you break your finger?

Braff: Walking.

Chalke: It’s part of who I am, but it’s also part of who Elliot is.

Braff: I think if we put in the show how really klutzy you are, people would think it’s too much.

Was there anything you were nostalgic for that wasn’t in the new incarnation?

Chalke: Sam Lloyd.

Braff: Sam Lloyd who played the lawyer was such a big part of the show and not only a fan favorite, but our favorite. He was just the funniest, nicest man. And Bill calls people like Sam Lloyd “comedy assassins.” They come in and they have one line and you’re laughing. And he was one of the greats.

Faison: It’s not the same “Scrubs.” And I kind of miss a little bit of that. There are so many new stories to tell. And you get nostalgic when you see the stuff that we’re doing in it, but I do sometimes miss some of the stories that we told in the past. It’s like capturing lightning in the bottle again, and I feel like we did it. I really do hope we have that opportunity again. I really do hope that this isn’t just nine. But it’s important for the audience to know that we’re definitely older. That’s just real talk. I’m not a 26-year-old man anymore. I’m 50.

“Strip Law,” a new cartoon premiering Friday, finds Netflix in an Adult Swim state of mind, which is to say there was no thought of it being made for everybody. (Possibly including some of the people it was made for.) It’s rude, lewd, surreal in a banal sort of way, at times ridiculously violent — that is, the violence is ridiculous.

It was the cast that attracted me: Adam Scott, once more the schlemiel as leading man; Janelle James, sure of her own magnificence, not far from her character on “Abbott Elementary”; and Keith David, whose deep, sonorous voice is almost necessarily one of authority, turned to good or evil or in between as the script demands. James and David, especially, I could listen to for days.

Created by Cullen Crawford, (“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Star Trek: Lower Decks”), the series is centered on a failing Las Vegas law firm, headed by Scott’s Lincoln Gumb, with James as Sheila Flambé, “a magician and three-year all-county sex champion” he hires as his “co-counsel in charge of spectacle.” Niece Irene (Shannon Gisela), an iron-pumping 16-year-old, works as his investigator; she wears a blindfold labeled “Underage” whenever she’s required to be in a bar. Stephen Root plays his disbarred (later undisbarred — rebarred?) lawyer uncle, Glem Blorchman, the strangest of them all — “It’s 115 degrees out so I put marshmallows in gin,” is something he says as they gather to watch Christmas movies. And David plays Lincoln’s nemesis, Stevie Nichols, the very successful former partner of Lincoln’s late mother, upon whom the son remains perversely fixated.

Much of it is the sort of thing that will work or not work depending on your mood, but generally I prefer the small throwaway jokes to the big gross ones. There are self-reflexive meta gags about “hard-working cartoon writers” and “reappropriating out-of-date catchphrases.” There are many nods to “The Simpsons,” including “frosty chocolate milkshakes” and James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films logo. The final episode, of 10, takes place within the finale of a “Suits”-like legal dramedy. (“It’s against their nature to let something be sweet and fun and airy,” that firm’s bromantic lawyers say of Lincoln’s team. “They have to make it dark and strange and crass.”) And there are left-field references to Cocteau Twins and Bikini Kill, whose “original bass player” Glem claims to be. (“I don’t know what Bikini Kill is,” says Irene. “Neither did I, according to Kathleen Hanna,” says Glem.)

There are various oddball judges (nothing remotely legal happens in a courtroom); “local character” Lunch Meat, who turns up in many roles; a barman, Mr. O’Raviolo, who switches between exaggerated Irish and Italian accents in mid-sentence. Comedian George Wallace plays himself as the mayor of Las Vegas. A Halloween Christmas episode parodies “Miracle on 34th Street”; another takes off on Colton Burpo, the “boy who saw Heaven,” which includes a live-action trailer for a faith-based film featuring Tim Heidecker as a coke-snorting atheistic Lincoln. A virtual reality HR seminar is hosted by “a computerized amalgamation of all five personalities of the Rat Pack,” an immersive Autoverse, in which actors create situations that somehow amount to a driving test. There are the “Nevada-grown” Hot Dates, a sexualized version of the California Raisins; riots occur when the characters are redesigned to be more respectable (“They’re walking away from years of established canon,” laments Lincoln.)

The series felt a little off-putting at first, as if it were straining for effect, but gathered steam as it went on, either because the later episodes are weirder or better written, or because one just gets used to being in that world with those people. There is just enough character in the comedy to create stakes in the narrative; its misfit energy has fueled the screen’s bands of outsiders throughout the years. (“Even when you’re a disaster, you’re a disaster for the right people,” Irene tells Lincoln.) As to the famous fine line between stupid and clever, the stupidity and the cleverness are all but inextricable, and to the point.

The credits declare that the series is “proudly made by real, non-computer human beings,” which is pleasant to know, and in 100 years will still have been the best way to make cartoons, even if by then they are only made by and, for all we know, for machines. The thin-lined drawing style is standard for more or less realistic 21st-century adult TV animation, with perhaps a hint of comics artist Daniel Clowes laid on. But the characters are expressive, and the medium is used to unreal ends, which is, after all, what cartoons are good for.

Tom Noonan, a character actor and filmmaker known for playing villains in “Manhunter” and “The Last Action Hero,” died on Valentine’s Day. He was 74.

The death was confirmed by Fred Dekker, director of “The Monster Squad,” who wrote on Facebook, “Tom’s indelible performance as Frankenstein … is a highlight of my modest filmography.”

Noonan had a nearly 40-year career on TV and in film, making his mark with a role in “Manhunter,” the 1986 movie based on a Thomas Harris novel.

In “Manhunter,” which starred William Peterson of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” as an FBI agent and “Succession” star Brian Cox as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Noonan played Francis Dolarhyde, the serial killer also known as the Tooth Fairy. It was a performance that “knocked out” Dekker, who then pursued Noonan for “Monster Squad.”

Playing a killer wasn’t unusual for Noonan, who stood 6-foot-5 or 6-foot-6, depending on who you trust. On a 2013 episode of TV’s “The Blacklist,” he played “the Stewmaker,” a man with a taste for dissolving human bodies in acid. In the 1993 comedy “The Last Action Hero” he was the Ripper, a fictional nemesis who comes to life in the high-concept film-within-a-film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as action star Jack Slater.

Born in Greenwich, Conn., on April 12, 1951, Noonan was raised by his math-teacher mother Rita and a large extended family after the death of his father, John Ford Noonan Sr. He went to school at Yale Drama and later founded New York’s Paradise Factory theater with Jack Kruger at the site of the Paradise Ice Cream Factory, where the ice cream cone was invented. The two built a theater and rehearsal rooms where the condemned building stood.

Paradise Factory now bills itself as “bringing the rigor of theatrical discipline to the process of cinematic art, and bringing the intimacy and immediacy of the cinema into theatrical performance art.”

“I wish I had more success as an actor,” the New York-based actor told The Times with a dash of melancholy in 2015. “I think people call me because they’re channel surfing late at night and they see me in a movie on cable.”

In that story, about the actor and his friend and collaborator Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman’s stop-motion animation film “Anomalisa,” a Times staff writer described Noonan: “Like Kaufman, he has a dark worldview, an idiosyncratic sensibility, blackly comic thoughts and, at times, an endearing crankiness.”

In “Anomalisa,” Noonan was credited with playing “Everyone Else” — and that wasn’t an exaggeration. Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Thewlis played the leads; Noonan voiced more than 40 other roles in the film.

“Even I can’t tell if it’s me sometimes,” he told The Times in 2015 about the extensive studio-recording process. “I mean, I recognize the voice, but I’m not sure where it came from.”

“My first TV interview was with Tom Noonan for a local NYC show called MIDDAY(?),” actor Jerry O’Connell wrote early Wednesday on Instagram, including a blurry image of them on the show’s set. “I was so nervous. Tom was so kind. I saw him in every (NYC) play he was in after. He bought my brother and I tickets to Eddie Murphy’s RAW (we were too young to purchase). Btw, on this episode, I was talking about a movie about to come out (Stand By Me) and Mr. Noonan was talking about his movie (Manhunter). Rest In Peace LEGEND.”

Noonan appeared in the famous 1980 flop “Heaven’s Gate” and cast a creepy gothic shadow decades later in “The House of the Devil” (2009). He was a ghoulish host of a late-night television horror program in the 2005 vampire movie “The Roost,” then played a wagon-train missionary in the 2007 western “Seraphim Falls.”

“Robocop 2” (1990) had Noonan as Cain, a messianic maniac with a nose ring who leads a gang of terrorist dope dealers.

In 18 episodes of the series “Hell on Wheels,” which ran for five seasons on AMC, he was the Rev. Nathaniel Cole. Other TV credits included episodes of Fox’s “The X-Files,” HBO’s “The Leftovers,” CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and the Louis C.K. series “Louie” (FX) and “Horace and Pete.”

Noonan’s half-dozen directing credits include the 1994 film “What Happened Was …,” which was produced as a play, then became a movie and then won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature. In addition to writing and directing the movie, Noonan played the lead male role opposite actor Karen Sillas. Noonan also won Sundance’s Waldo Salt screenwriting award for the script.

The next year, his feature “The Wife” — a dark comedy once again written, directed by and starring Noonan — was a nominee for the same Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Described by the New York Times as a “bleakly funny evisceration of modern marriage,” the movie co-starred Karen Young, who was Noonan’s wife from 1992 to 1999.

And Noonan’s 2015 movie “The Shape of Something Squashed” was born out of confusion and some despair after his agent called him with what initially looked like a part in one of the “Mockingjay” installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise. When he got the script, though, he saw only one role for someone his age, and that job — playing President Snow — already belonged to Donald Sutherland.

Turns out there never had been a part in the offing. Sutherland was just busy, and Jennifer Lawrence and the rest of the “Hunger Games” cast needed someone to rehearse with them for a week.

After recovering from a brief emotional tailspin, Noonan knocked out the script for “The Shape of Something Squashed” — then directed and acted in the film.

He was preceded in death by his older brother, “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking” playwright John Ford Noonan Jr., who died in 2018 at age 77.

Former Times staff writer Steve Zeitchik contributed to this report.

This article contains spoilers from the Season 3 finale of “Tell Me Lies.”

“Tell Me Lies” ended with the hard truth.

Based on the book by Carola Lovering, the Hulu series centers on the toxic and manipulative on-again, off-again relationship between college students Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco — portrayed by real-life couple Grace Van Patten and Jackson White — whose distressing bond causes a ripple effect of chaos and turmoil for their friend group that stretches across eight years.

It all culminated in Tuesday’s Season 3 finale, which brought explosive revelations, the return of old habits and final fractures to the friend group. But what about its central pair?

Across the show’s two timelines, Stephen’s admission to Yale Law School was revoked and his engagement blew up — but is that enough retribution for the most-hated fictional millennial man with a buzz cut after all the emotional and mental abuse he inflicted? Meanwhile, Lucy’s life is upended when she is expelled from school; but years later, and not without making another questionable choice, she is finally free from his torment. For good. Hours before the finale dropped, creator Meaghan Oppenheimer announced the series would not return for another season.

Over two separate video interviews from New York — Oppenheimer from her home; Van Patten and White, later in the day, from a hotel room — The Times caught up with the trio to discuss bringing the dark and twisted saga to an end, why Stephen wasn’t dealt more severe punishment and the love story between Bree and Wrigley. The conversations have been combined and edited for clarity and length.

Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White) in the series finale of “Tell Me Lies.”

(Ian Watson / Disney)

Before we dive into the finale, the other big news is the announcement that the show will not return for another season. Would you have wanted more or are three seasons enough?

Oppenheimer: This was definitely a very thoughtful, mutual decision that I came to with Hulu and 20th [Television,” which produces the show]. I went into this season wanting to write it with a sense of finality. I always felt like three seasons was sort of a perfect number for a smaller show like this. I always envisioned Lucy and Stephen’s worst, biggest breakup in college, and her public downfall culminating with the wedding weekend. But we went into this season not knowing for sure if there would be another one — and after seeing the amazing fan response and the numbers being so great, we definitely discussed “is there an organic way to keep it going?” I was definitely trying to make a very specific point with the way that Lucy and Stephen ended, which is that it was inevitable that he was going to hurt her, and that if she chooses him over her friends, she’s going to lose them. To keep going after that and force them back in each other’s lives, it would have felt like it was undermining the stakes of everything we set up.

Does it feel like the right time to be done with these characters?

Van Patten: It does. Of course, it’s bittersweet. But in terms of the story, it feels really right that it’s ending here, and we’ve had a beginning, a middle and an end.

White: I like the way that goes out.

Will you be glad to not be the most hated fictional man on TV?

White: I’m stoked. I’m stoked. I really am. I’m really excited to not trigger people like that. It’s a strange burden, like an odd social burden.

Van Patten: Because it’s out of love, but what they’re saying is so negative.

White: Yeah, it’s a compliment, but it’s mean. It’s kind of like how Stephen talks to the other characters.

Grace Van Patten as Lucy Albright in the final moments of the “Tell Me Lies” series finale. (Ian Watson/Disney) (Ian Watson/Disney)

Finales are challenging because they come with a lot of expectations from fans. Since you weren’t sure if the series might return, how did that shape how you wrapped this third season?

Oppenheimer: I had to go into it not worrying too much about what would happen in the future. When we found the [Season 3] ending in the writers room, we all were like, “Oh s—, that’s the ending to the story, not the ending of the season.”

Sometimes, when I see certain [fan] theories, I’m like, “What show are you watching?” I think people that were expecting a resolution to the Macy story, for instance, for him [Stephen] to get arrested — that’s so surprising to me … because I’m like, “I don’t feel like you’re watching the same show that I’m watching.” It’s one of the few things that we kept from the book. He doesn’t get justice for that. In reality, people get away with really bad things and that’s one of the scary truths of the show.

How did you and the writers decide on the moment that ends the series? Lucy choosing to ride off with Stephen after the wedding goes off the rails, only for him to leave her stranded at a gas station.

Oppenheimer: The show was going to end in one of three ways: Does she reject him? Does he reject her? Or do they end up together? I felt for a very long time that they should not end up together because this is a story about abuse. I don’t think this is a love story. It felt like staying true to what the show meant not having this overly positive, optimistic ending where she wins.

At the same time, the one thing we’ve learned about Stephen is that he will never let you go unless he’s the one making that decision. For Lucy to actually be free of him, he needed to be the one to walk away. It actually is the only way for her to really wake up and see it.

I will get images for scenes before I know what the actual scene is, and it’ll be almost more of like a symbolic image, or it’ll be a fable that I’ve heard before. But I said to the writers room, “I just want it to be her finally having the decision — Bree or him, friends or him — and her choosing him and then, it’s not this, but it’s as if he just drives away and leaves her by the side of the road.” And they were all like, “He could literally just drive away and leave her by the side of the road.” The idea of her being on this island alone, and the inevitability of it. And that’s why we have the whole —

Grace Van Patten on ending the series: “Of course, it’s bittersweet. But in terms of the story, it feels really right that it’s ending here, and we’ve had a beginning, a middle and an end.”

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

Allusion in the previous episode to the scorpion and frog fable?

Oppenheimer: Yes. The answer is, of course, he was going to hurt you because he’s Stephen. It’s in his nature. Also he’s not driving away, thrilled and happy. When he says, I’ve just blown up my entire life. If I hurt you, I’m hurting myself. It’s true. He would have more fun if he just learned to be nice and be with Lucy. But he can’t help it. His nature is to win and to wound and to get the last laugh.

White: That character is all about himself, and this is one final way to leave on the last laugh.

Van Patten: I find the ending to actually be a little bit helpful. I think there’s a lot of freedom and relief in that last moment when she realizes he left her.

There’s that almost wistful look that she has at the gas station, getting the coffees. Then there’s the one when she realizes she’s been stranded and all she can do is laugh. It’s quite the trajectory.

Van Patten: Every time Lucy has gone back to Stephen, she’s completely in denial. There’s a sense of hope, maybe it’s going to be different this time — also, he had just blown up every relationship she had at the wedding. We’re completely on an island together. There’s this hope of like, maybe we can be OK now, there are no more secrets left. The friend group isn’t together. There’s nothing being held over one another’s head. Then she’s hit with, “Oh, my God he did it again. Shame on me.” She totally could have cried, but she just decided to laugh instead because it is predictable. She actually saw it for the first time as definitive.

Jackson White on playing the hated character Stephen: “It’s a strange burden, like an odd social burden.”

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

How did you and the writers grapple with why Evan and Bree would invite Stephen to the wedding after everything that happened in college?

Oppenheimer: It’s one of the things that struck me in the book and scares me about a lot of young men in general (especially operating within groups) — the way guys tend to forgive other guys for what they do to girls. When Evan and Stephen leave things in senior year, they’re actually at a relatively good place with each other. Even though Evan knows that Bree knows the truth (about Lucy‘s one-night stand), he knows that Stephen still recognizes the worst parts of him, so he’s made a decision to keep him close in order to keep himself safe. Bree has a line where she says, “I begged Evan not to invite him.” So it’s not up to Bree, and like a lot of people do, she’s decided to accept that her fiancé has this friend she hates.

On social media, there are fans who say they won’t be satisfied if this show doesn’t end with Stephen dying. And there was the theory that characters were plotting their revenge on him to take place at the wedding. What do you make of that? Why not go that route?

Oppenheimer: When you’re writing anything based on fan expectations or giving them the happy ending all tied in a bow, I think you’re doing a disservice to the story. Different writers would do different things. I have to stay true to my taste. Hoping for all that, I get it. But I think that the way that we do it is with a laugh.

But why not go that route? It just didn’t feel realistic. Maybe I’m just very jaded, but as I look around the world — everyone after #MeToo was like, “Oh, did we cancel all the men?” It’s like, “No, we didn’t.” That is the reality of the world that we live in, especially now, with everything coming out about the Epstein files — it’s appalling. To me, it feels almost belittling to people who’ve been abused and been in these kind of things to say, “Oh, it all works out in the end.” But also, I will say, Stephen is not going to be happy. He’s miserable.

White: He was hardwired to hate. I think the character was designed to start hating. He’s started as a confusing character, and by the end, I think it’s pretty clear that he is one-sided and complicated, sure, but also unquestionably immoral. And there’s a lot of satisfaction in wanting to take that person out, especially if you’re projecting your own whatever onto this character. I totally understand the impulse to want to ice him. But that’s not the way the world works, and I think that’s why the ending is well done because [that’s] not always the case. You don’t get that satisfaction. You actually have to live with it for a long time. And I think the message is that it’ll keep happening over and over and over unless you fix it yourself. No one’s gonna save you. You have to heal yourself.

What about the outcome of the college timeline — in the end, Yale revokes its law school admission offer to Stephen after receiving a tip about behavior that goes against its code of conduct, namely the distribution of pornographic material, which we come to learn was Wrigley’s doing. And that’s one big loss for Stephen. What intrigued you about that? And was it always going to be Wrigley who did that?

Oppenheimer: We didn’t think, initially, that it was going to get reported. That was something that someone — I can’t remember who it was — said, “It really doesn’t feel fair for Diana not to get to go to Yale after everything she’s done to get past every obstacle to better her life.” Then when we were deciding who reports him, it was just very obvious that it needed to be Wrigley because it’s the last person Stephen expects. I thought it was really important to have a guy … it really devastates me the way that men choose other men over their female friends and turn a blind eye. I just wanted one boy to stand up against the other mean boys.

White: I think [having Yale revoke his admission] really messed him [Stephen] up. He is a survivor, though, he’s a shark. A lot of these people don’t face consequences. I think eventually they do. Everything does come around. I think the people who wish ill upon other people will get what’s coming to them. We’re just not going to see when. But in his lifetime, he will get his ass kicked in that way.

Grace Van Patten, left, on the set of “Tell Me Lies” with showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer.

(Ian Watson / Disney)

To move on to Lucy, we learn what happened in the college timeline that led to her being largely estranged from the friend group. Grace, what stands out to you about playing her in that state of numbness to her life crashing down?

Van Patten: It’s been set up the past two seasons, in the present day, that the worst thing happened to Lucy in college, and we haven’t known what that thing was until this last episode. It’s the last piece of the puzzle for the audience to see what really ruined Lucy’s life. It was so tragic and heartbreaking because she is not computing anything. She’s completely reverting back to being a little girl and doesn’t know how to deal with getting in trouble, and she’s not taking in what’s what’s going on; she’s completely disassociating. I think if she allows herself to feel, then she would not be able to pick herself up off the floor. It’s self-protection and complete denial.

“It’s the last piece of the puzzle for the audience to see what really ruined Lucy’s life,” says Grace Van Patten of “Tell Me Lies.”

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

At what point did you both learn that it was Bree who released the tape with Lucy confessing to lying about being sexually assaulted by Chris — a lie she told to protect Pippa, his actual victim?

Van Patten: I forget if it was through reading or Meaghan just telling us before we got the scripts. I was definitely surprised by that because the first few episodes, they’re really emphasizing the closeness between Lucy and Bree and how they’ve developed this really tight-knit relationship, which made sense; they were bumping it up to make that feel like real betrayal. But I just see it as Bree getting even.

White: I really did like that. I liked playing that I genuinely didn’t do it.

Tell me more.

Van Patten: His first time!

White: Just because every single person will obviously think he did. We’ve just established him for three years as the guy who would do that. And to actually have it not be him is confusing, and it was very fun to play. I did not do this horrible thing — I’ve done a lot of other horrible things, but I didn’t do this.

I love the way you deliver the line, when it clicks for you that it was Bree — “Oh, my God, you released the tape, didn’t you?”

White: If the character’s putting pieces together, I like to try and put pieces together. It was just easy to act in that moment. That entire wedding sequence was very easy for everybody because it was well-crafted. We were all bringing it. We knew it was one of the big, important moments.

The cake got demolished.

White: Branden Cook [Evan] is amazing in that sequence.

Van Patten: He insisted that he do that stunt. He was like stretching beforehand.

White: He was chomping at the bit. Oh, he was ready.

Was the end goal to find a way to use ‘Toxic” by Britney Spears to score the climax?

Oppenheimer: I love it so much. It’s really funny because since Season 1, I was, “When are we gonna use ‘Toxic’?” It’s just so perfect for the show. We were editing that scene and we were throwing different songs in, and we’d actually tried this other song that worked really well — “I Gotta Feeling” [by the Black Eyed Peas]. But then I was like, “Should we just try ‘Toxic’?” And my editor, Jen, was like, “It’s literally now or never.” The way that the music lines up with Evan crashing into the cake. It timed out perfectly.

Wrigley (Spencer House) and Bree (Catherine Missal), during a break from the engagement party, have a conversation about their relationship that leads to sex. (Ian Watson / Disney)

The night of his wedding to Bree, Evan (Branden Cook) learns about her affair with Wrigley. (Danielle Blancher / Disney)

How did you arrive at some of the other big moments, like Bree and Wrigley. She goes through with the wedding, but their secret is out. What happens next for them? It’s also like, is this trauma bonding or … ?

Oppenheimer: I don’t think it’s trauma bonding. I think they’re soul mates, personally. Trauma bonding is a thing, but there’s also something very real about meeting someone in a moment of grief and it has just taken all of your outer layer off, and it has exposed the real you. I think that’s what they’re seeing when they connect at the beginning of Season 3; they’re the truest version of themselves. I knew that I wanted it to come out because Evan could not get away with this. Evan could not have the happy marriage to Bree. Lucy had a choice that she was making with the full knowledge of the choice, but Bree doesn’t know all the things that Evan did to her to completely destroy her relationship with her mom. It would have felt so unfair for that to work out. I always saw that exploding and coming to light. That smile at the end of the wedding, that tells you they’re going to make this work. I literally wrote it into the action line of the script. I said, “Their eyes meet across the room, and they smile. And you get the sense that in spite of it all” — I think I wrote “carnage” — “they’re gonna find a way to make it work.” And I think they do.

White: I like happy endings, just as a viewer. I like when things work out for characters that didn’t really do anything bad. I love Wrigley and Bree. It’s a great relationship.

Van Patten: I love that relationship. I feel like they deserve each other and like they’re the two with the most well-rounded moral compass. They feel right together. And so do Pippa and Diana. They’re the only ones who are leaving happy, in the end. They’re like, “Let’s get out of here. We do not belong here.” And they just walk off. They kind of leave unscathed when everyone else is in the fire?

Grace Van Patten and Jackson White of “Tell Me Lies.”

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

Do you wish, especially as a real-life couple, that’s what you could have played?

Van Patten: I thought it was the perfect ending for these characters. If they ended up together and figured things out, it would just be so unrealistic. Look what these people have done to each other for the past three seasons. They’re not going to be OK together.

I guess I mean the whole trajectory, having to play the fictional couple that’s so toxic as you’re starting a relationship.

White: Yeah, not a lot of blending between work and real life.

Van Patten: Thank God. It’s only a nice, warm feeling to know we’re nothing like them. But it’s just fun acting together. We have to do crazy things and say crazy things. It’s very, very separated for us.

What do you hope for your characters?

White: I don’t hope much for him. I’m trying to think if I know anybody like that or with those tendencies — I do. I do know people who have a lot of similarities, and I pray for them, and I hope they do well. I also hope they get what’s coming to them. Actually let me take it to back because if somebody has wronged me, then I wish them the best. But for somebody like him, he’s sort of beyond that, isn’t he? I don’t know how to answer that question. I don’t know what I would want for him.

Van Patten: I hope that final instance that we see in the last episode pushes her into a journey of self-analysis and her really trying to figure out why she looks for that type of thing in a relationship, and why she has been so drawn to that. Hopefully she does the work to change that and focus on the relationships that matter, that she should be paying more attention to. I hope it’s the beginning for her.

On a final note, I will say, I was relieved to see Stephen at least left behind Lucy’s purse.

White: That’s pretty funny.

Van Patten: I wish there was footage of him placing it there. Like, him hopping out of the car and carefully placing it. I always wondered if he parked in a place where he can see Lucy, just to see her reaction.