character

A former ‘Modern Family’ child star has opened up to fans about her sexuality.

Aubrey Anderson-Emmons played Lily Tucker-Pritchett, the adopted daughter of a same-sex couple, on the 22-time Emmy-winning series. And on Sunday, she took to TikTok to announce that she is bisexual. In her post, the 18-year-old lip-syncs to audio of a scene from the hit ABC show.

“No, I’m not, I’m gay! I’m gay!” her character says, while her stepgrandmother, Sofia Vergara’s Gloria Delgado-Pritchett, tells her “You are Vietnamese.” Her father Mitchell Pritchett, played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, responds, “You’re not gay, you’re just confused … Oh, my God, what is wrong with me?”

However, the reveal came in the layover text, in which Anderson-Emmons wrote, “People keep joking so much abt [sic] me being gay when I literally am (I’m bi).” The caption said, “happy pride month and to all a good night.”

Many fans rejoiced in the comments, with one claiming she was “the sassy princess raised by two queens,” referencing her parents in the show, Mitchell Pritchett and Cameron Tucker (Eric Stonestreet).

Another simply joked that she was “half gay, half Vietnamese,” based on the audio.

“Modern Family” has long been celebrated for its LGBTQ+ representation, with a specific highlight being the marriage between Mitch and Cam. Anderson-Emmons’ character joined the show in its third season.

During its 11-season run, the show earned nominations for outstanding comedy series at the GLAAD Media Awards for 10 consecutive years, winning in both 2011 and 2012.

Since the series ended in April 2020, Anderson-Emmons has pivoted toward a music career. She recently released a single, “Telephones and Traffic,” and teased another single, “Don’t Forget Me,” out on June 27.

Guests will be asked to pick a side at Six Flags Magic Mountain’s “DC Heroes and Villains” fest.

(Six Flags Magic Mountain)

The Valencia coaster park this summer is leaning into superhero properties. The likes of Batman, Superman, Catwoman, the Joker and more are taking part in an evening show that marries dance parties, stunt shows and audience participation. Its “DC Heroes and Villains Fest” runs weekends throughout the summer beginning June 20, with festivities starting at 5 p.m.

There’s a plot each night, and it centers on villains trying to spoil a statue dedication to Batman. Audiences are said to be able to align with heroes or villains to see who has control of Gotham City each evening. Expect a stunt show finish and plenty of silliness, such as a dad joke or strength contests. Dance events will center on Catwoman, the Joker and Harley Quinn, nonheroes who will be trying to woo guests with family-friendly entertainment.

While “DC Heroes and Villains Fest” had yet to begin at the time of writing, Magic Mountain is hoping for a theater-heavy experience.

“A lot of my team comes from New York, the Broadway side,” Mike Ostrom, manager of entertainment and events for the park, told immersive podcast No Proscenium. “So we’re trying to bring a lot of theatrical elements and story arc and all those things that involve the crowd, the participants, to really get involved in what they’re seeing.”

On a recent walk through the charred and twisted remains and scraped-flat plateau of the Pacific Palisades, local historian Randy Young paused a couple of hundred yards into the mouth of Temescal Canyon, above Sunset Boulevard, to let the eerie randomness of the January flames sink in. So much was erased in so little time, leaving the lasting impression, whether from afar or close-up, of a wasteland — a place almost wiped off the map.

But here, in the narrows of the canyon, where Temescal Creek tickled the roots of sycamores and cooled the air beneath the heavy branches of valley oaks, Young lighted up with the enthusiasm of an amateur botanist.

“The oak trees took all of the fire’s embers. They caught them like catcher’s mitts,” said Young, who grew up in adjacent Rustic Canyon and until recently lived in a Palisades apartment near Temescal.

The 1920s Chautauqua Conference Grounds in what became Pacific Palisades included a grocery and meat market.

(Pacific Palisades Historical Society)

Those trees, and the green (and thus less flammable) edges of the creek, helped to save a row of small, wooden cottages and a cluster of wood-shingled, pitched-roof buildings that were the remains of the 77-acre Chautauqua Assembly Camp, once the thriving nucleus of a 1920s effort to shape the Palisades as a spiritual and intellectual lodestar on the California Coast. The Chautauqua movement — founded in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, N.Y., to better train Sunday-school teachers — swept the country in the late 19th century, blossoming into a network of assemblies drawing rural and working-class Americans hungry for education, culture and social progress. While short-lived, the local camp would form the blueprint for Pacific Palisades to this day.

Young, who has co-written books about the Palisades and its surrounding communities, stepped onto the short boardwalk fronting a modest wooden structure. “This was the grocery store and meat market,” he noted. Rounding the slope at the back, he pointed to an old Adirondack-style dining hall — now called Cheadle Hall but originally Woodland Hall — its simple post-and-beam and wood wainscoting preserved from the early 1920s. He also spoke of what had been lost over the decades: Across the glade had stood a barnlike, three-tiered auditorium. Nearby, he said, had been a log-cabin library. Up and down the canyon were dozens of river-rock cottages and timbered casitas, and 200 canvas tents raised on wooden platforms.

South of Sunset Boulevard (then known as Marquez Road), on a site that now includes Palisades Charter High School, was the Institute Camp, containing an amphitheater carved out of a natural bowl, where thousands of summertime campers would hear the likes of Leo Tolstoy’s son, Illya, speaking on “The True Russia,” or Bakersfield-born Lawrence Tibbett, who would become one of the country’s greatest baritones, perform selections from his Metropolitan Opera repertoire. The Institute Camp also housed the Founders Oak, a tree that marked the site of the community’s 1922 founding ceremony, and lots for independent groups, like the WE Boys and Jesus our Companion (J.O.C.), Methodist-affiliated clubs who made a former Mission Revival home into the Aldersgate Lodge (925 Haverford Ave.) in 1928.

A 1922 Thanksgiving gathering fills rows of the since-destroyed amphitheater set under oaks and sycamores in Temescal Canyon.

(Pacific Palisades Historical Society)

In the sylvan canyon, the Palisades Chautauqua offered a bewildering array of ways to lift oneself up: hiking and calisthenics, elocution and oratory, homemaking and child psychology, music, history, politics, literature and theater. Tinged with piety, these were, in their own words, “high class, jazz-free resort facilities.”

The official dedication of the Palisades Chautauqua on Aug. 6, 1922, would be the last of its kind in the country. It was spearheaded by Rev. Charles Holmes Scott, a Methodist minister and educational reformer who dreamed of creating the “Chautauqua of the West.” The influence of the movement was so central to the Palisades’ identity that in 1926, one of its main thoroughfares — Chautauqua Boulevard — was named in its honor.

Scott, inspired by the Chautauqua tradition’s ideals of self-transformation, envisioned Pacific Palisades as a place where character would matter more than commerce. “Banks and railroads and money is always with us. But the character and integrity of our men and women is something money cannot buy. We will prove the worth of man,” Scott declared. Residents signed 99-year leases to ensure the community’s cooperative nature. The leasehold model was also meant to prevent speculation, fund cultural facilities and events, and uphold moral standards. Alcohol, billboards and architectural extravagance were all prohibited — as was, alas, anyone who wasn’t Protestant or white.

The Palisades Assn., under Scott’s guidance, purchased nearly 2,000 acres of mesa, foothills and coastline. Pasadena landscape architect Clarence Day drew up the first plans, establishing a new axis, Via de la Paz, or Way of Peace, eventually home to Pacific Palisades United Methodist Community Church (1930) and terminating at a neoclassical, Napoleonic-scaled Peace Temple, atop Peace Hill. He laid out two tracts: Founders Tract I, a tight-knit grid of streets (now known as the Alphabet Streets) for modest homes above Sunset Boulevard, and the curving Founders Tract II, closer to the coast with larger lots for more affluent residents.

Soon after, Day was replaced by the renowned Olmsted Brothers, who refined the layout to follow natural contours, planted thousands of trees and designed a stately civic center in which they wanted to include a library, hotel, lake, a park with a concert grove and a far larger, permanent auditorium. Only one major element of that center was realized: Clifton Nourse’s Churrigueresque-style Business Block building at Swarthmore and Sunset, completed in 1924.

Residents gather on Peace Hill on Easter Sunday in 1922.

(Pacific Palisades Historical Society)

By the end of 1923, it seemed as if the Palisades was destined to become a boom town, with 1,725 people making down payments totaling more than $1.5 million on 99-year renewable leases. In early 1924, demand slumped, never to revive. To preserve the dream, in 1926 Scott abandoned the lease-only model and began selling lots. That same year the association borrowed heavily to purchase 226 more ocean-view acres from the estate of railway magnate Collis P. Huntington, installing underground utilities and ornamental street lighting in an area that would become known as the Huntington Palisades. Debt soared from $800,000 in 1925 to $3.5 million by the end of 1926.

As the 1929 stock market crash hit and revenue dried up in the Great Depression, the association collapsed. Its assets were sold off. Grand plans, like the Civic Center and the Peace Temple, were abandoned. The dream withered.

“There wasn’t a moment where they said ‘we’re stopping,’” Young said. “It just sort of petered out.”

Yet fragments endured, stubbornly. In 1943, the Presbyterian Synod purchased the Chautauqua site and operated it as a retreat. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, local activists fought off a plan to extend Reseda Boulevard right through Temescal Canyon (though buildings like the library and assembly hall had already been torn down in anticipation of the roadway). In 1994, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy acquired the land. Today, it survives as the city-run Temescal Gateway Park, its board-and-batten cabins and rustic halls weathered but largely intact.

The Business Block — since January a fire-blackened shell awaiting its undetermined fate — narrowly escaped demolition in the 1980s when a developer proposed replacing it with a concrete and glass mall. A preservationist campaign under the slogan “Don’t Mall the Palisades” saved the structure.

But by then, the character of the Palisades had begun to shift. Faint echoes of the quiet, rustic past remained, but modest bungalows had given way to mansions. The artists, radicals and missionaries were largely gone.

“It’s not Chautauqua anymore — it’s Château Taco Bell,” Young quipped, of much of the area’s soulless new built forms.

Today, thanks to the fire’s brutality, the original Chautauqua sites offer something unusual: a landscape where past and present momentarily coexist. Slate roofs held firm. Ancient oak groves performed better than modern landscaping. For Young, the fires stripped away modern gloss to reveal what continues to matter.

“When you go through a fire,” he said, “you get down to the basics.” He added: “The fires brought us back to 1928.”

Pacific Palisades is one of a long list of failed California utopias. Like Llano del Rio, the socialist settlement in the Antelope Valley, or the Kaweah Colony, a cooperative in the Sierra foothills, it was a high-minded gamble dashed on the shoals of capitalism and human nature. The idealistic outpost lingers, etched into the land, embossed in the Palisades’ deeper memory. The dream may no longer be intact, but its traces are still legible.

The Emmys’ limited series/TV movie acting categories have come to represent some of the best and most-talked-about shows on television, and this year’s crop of contenders is no exception.

The seven actors who joined the 2025 Envelope Roundtable were Javier Bardem, who plays father, victim and alleged molester Jose Menendez in Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”; Renée Zellweger, who reprises her role as the British romantic heroine in “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”; Stephen Graham, who co-created and stars in “Adolescence” as the father of a teenage boy who commits a heinous murder; Jenny Slate, who plays the best friend of a terminally ill woman in FX’s “Dying for Sex”; Brian Tyree Henry, who portrays a man posing as a federal agent in order to rip off drug dealers in Apple TV+’s “Dope Thief”; Elizabeth Banks, who takes on the role of an estranged sibling and recovering alcoholic in Prime Video’s “The Better Sister”; and Sacha Baron Cohen, who appears as the deceived husband of a successful filmmaker in Apple TV+’s “Disclaimer.”

The Times’ news and culture critic Lorraine Ali spoke to the group about the emotional fallout of a heavy scene, the art of defying expectations and more. Read highlights from their conversation below and watch video of the roundtable above.

The 2025 Limited Series / TV Movie Roundtable: Elizabeth Banks, left, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jenny Slate, Javier Bardem, Brian Tyree Henry, Renée Zellweger and Stephen Graham.

Many of you move between drama and comedy. People often think, “Drama’s very serious and difficult, comedy’s light and easy.” Is that true?

Banks: I think the degree of difficulty with comedy is much higher. It’s really hard to sustainably make people laugh over time, whereas [with] drama, everyone relates to loss and pining for love that’s unrequited. Not everybody has great timing or is funny or gets satire.

Henry: There’s something fun about how closely intertwined they are. In my series, I’m playing a heroin addict running for my life, and I have this codependency with this friend … There’s a scene where I’ve been looking for him, and I’m high out of my mind, and I find him in my attic, and all he’s talking about is how he has to take a s—. And I’m like, “But they’re trying to kill us.” You just see him wincing and going through all these [groans]. It is so funny, but at the same time, you’re just terrified for both. There’s always humor somewhere in the drama.

Banks: There’s a reason why the theater [symbol] is a happy face/sad face. They’re very intertwined.

Renée Zellweger of “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.”

Renée, with Bridget Jones — how has she changed over the last 25 years and where is she now with “Mad About the Boy”?

Zellweger: Nobody’s the same from one moment to the next, one chapter to the next and certainly not from one year to the next. It’s been a really interesting sort of experiment to revisit a character in the different phases of her life.

What I’m really grateful for is that the timing runs in parallel to the sort of experiences that you have in your early 20s, 30s and so on. With each iteration, I don’t have to pretend that I’m less than I am, because I don’t want to be the character that I was, or played, when she was 29, 35. I don’t want to do that, and I certainly don’t want to do that now.

So it was really nice to meet her again in this place of what she’s experiencing in the moment, which is bereavement and the loss of her great love, and being a mom, and trying to be responsible, and reevaluating what she values, and how she comports herself, and what’s important and all of that, because, of course, I relate to that in this moment.

Stephen, “Adolescence” follows a family dealing with the fallout of their 13-year-old son being accused of a brutal murder. You direct and star in the series. What was it like being immersed in such heavy subject matter? Did it come home with you?

Graham: We did that first episode, the end of it was quite heavy and quite emotional. When we said, “Cut,” all of us older actors and the crew were very emotional. There were hugs and a bit of applause.

And then everyone would be like, “Where’s Owen?” [Cooper, the teenage actor who plays Graham’s character’s son]. “Is Owen OK? Is he with his child psychologist?” No, Owen’s upstairs playing swing ball with his tutor. It was like OK, that’s the way to do this — not to take myself too seriously when we say, “Cut,” but when I am there, immerse myself in it.

Let’s be honest, we can all be slightly self-obsessed. My missus, she’s the best for me because I’d phone her and say, “I had a really tough day. I had to cry all day. My wife’s died of cancer, and it was a really tough one.” She goes, “The dog s— all over the living room. I had to go shopping and the f— bag split when I got to Tesco. There was a flat tire. They’ve let the kids out of school early because there’s been a flood. And you’ve had a hard day pretending to be sad?”

Bardem: I totally agree with what Stephen says. You have a life with your family and your children that you have to really pay attention to. This is a job, and you just do the job as good as you can with your own limitations. You put everything into it when they say, “Action,” and when you’re out, you just leave it behind. Otherwise, it’s too much.

Certain scenes, certain moments stay with you because we work with what we are. But I think it doesn’t make you a better actor to really stay in character, as they say, for 24 hours. That doesn’t work for me. It actually makes me feel very confused if I do that.

On the show “Monsters” I tried to protect Cooper [Koch] and Nicholas [Alexander Chavez], the actors who play the children, because they were carrying the heavy weight on the show every day. I was trying to make them feel protected and loved and accompanied by us, the adults, and let them know that we are there for them and that this is fiction. Because they were going really deep into it, and they did an amazing job.

Elizabeth Banks of “The Better Sister.”

Elizabeth, in “The Better Sister,” you portray Nicky, a sister estranged from her sibling who’s been through quite a bit of her own trauma.

Banks: I play a drunk who’s lost her child and her husband, basically, to her little sister, played by Jessica Biel. She is grappling with trauma from her childhood, which she’s trying not to bring forward. She’s been working [with] Alcoholics Anonymous, an incredible program, to get through her stuff. But she’s also a fish out of water when she visits her sister, who [lives in a] very rarefied New York, literary, fancy rich world. My character basically lives in a trailer park in Ohio. There’s a lot going on. And there’s a murder mystery.

I loved the complication … but it brought up all of those things for me. I do think you absolutely leave most of that [heaviness] on set. You are mining it all for the character work, so you’ve got to find it, but I don’t need to then infect my own children with it.

Sacha Baron Cohen of “Disclaimer.”

Sacha, you have played and created these really gregarious characters like Ali G or Borat. Your character in “Disclaimer,” he’s not a character you created, but he is very understated. Was that a challenge?

Cohen: It took me a long time to work out who the character was. I said to [director] Alfonso [Cuarón], “I don’t understand why this guy goes on that journey from where we see him in Act 1.” For me it was, how do you make this person unique?

We worked a lot through the specificity of what words he uses and what he actually says to explain and give hints for me as an actor. A lot of that was Alfonso Cuarón saying, “Take it down.” And there was a lot of rewriting and loads of drafts before I even understood how this guy reacts to the news and information that he believes about his wife.

Jenny Slate of “Dying for Sex.”

Jenny, “Dying for Sex” is based on a true story about two friends. One has terminal cancer, and the other — your character — supports her right up until the end. Talk about what it was like to play that role in a series that alternates between biting humor and deep grief.

Slate: Michelle Williams, who does a brilliant job in this show, her energy is extending outward and [her character] is trying to experiment before she does the greatest experiment of all, which is to cross over into the other side. My character is really out there, not out there willy-nilly, but she will yell at people if they are being rude, wasteful or if she feels it’s unjust. [And she’s] going from blasting to taking all that energy and making it this tight laser, and pointing it right into care, and knowing more about herself at the end.

I am a peppy person, and I felt so excited to have the job that a lot of my day started with calming myself down. I’m at work with Michelle Williams and Sissy Spacek and Liz Meriwether and Shannon Murphy and being, like, “Siri, set a meditation timer for 10 minutes,” and making myself do alternate nostril breathing [exercises].

Brian Tyree Henry of “Dope Thief.”

Brian, many people came to know you from your role as Paper Boi in “Atlanta.” The series was groundbreaking and like nothing else on television. What was it like moving out of that world and onto other projects?

Henry: People really thought that I was this rapper that they pulled off the street from Atlanta. To me, that’s the greatest compliment … When I did “Bullet Train,” I was shocked at how many people thought I was British. I was like, “Oh, right. Now I’ve twisted your mind this way.” I was [the voice of] Megatron at one point, and now I’ve twisted your mind that way. My path in is always going to be stretching people’s imaginations, because they get so attached to characters that I’ve played that they really believe that I’m that person.

People feel like they have an ownership of who you are. I love the challenge of having to force the imaginations of the viewers and myself to see me in a departure [from] what they saw me [as] previously. Because I realize that when I walk in a room, before I even open my mouth, there’s 90 different things that are put on me or taken away from me because of how I look and how I carry myself.

Javier Bardem of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.”

Javier, since doing the series are you now frequently asked about your own opinions on the Menendez case? The brothers claim their father molested them, and that is in part what led to them murdering their parents.

Bardem: I don’t think anybody knows. That’s the point. That was the great thing about playing that character, is you have to play it in a way that it’s not obvious that he did those things that he was accused of, because nobody knows, but at the same time you have to make people believe that he was capable.

I did say to Ryan [Murphy] that I can’t do a scene with a kid. Because in the beginning, they do drafts, and there were certain moments where I said, “I can’t. It’s not needed.” The only moment that I had a hard time was when [Jose] has to face [his] young kid. It was only a moment where Jose was mean to him. That’s not in my nature.

Henry: I discovered, while doing my series, “My body doesn’t know this isn’t real.” There’s an episode where I’m shot in the leg, and I’m bleeding out and I’m on all this different morphine and drugs and all this stuff, and I’m literally lying on this ground, take after take, having to mime this. To go through the delusion of this pain … in the middle of the takes, it was just so crazy. I would literally look at the crew and say, “Somebody hug me! Somebody!”

Stephen, that scene where you confront the boys in the parking lot with the bike, I was just like, “Oh, my God, how many times did he have to do that?” This kid gets in your face, and I was like, “Punch the kid!” My heart went out to you, man, not just as the character but as you being in there.

Graham: Because we did it all in one take, we had that unique quality. You’re using the best of two mediums. You’ve got that beauty and that spontaneity and that reality of the theater, and then you have the naturalism and the truth that we have with film and television. So by the time I get to that final bit, we’ve been through all those emotions. When I open the door and go into [Jamie’s] room, everything’s shaken. But it’s not you. It’s an out-of-body experience and just comes from somewhere else.

Bardem: Listen, we don’t do brain surgery, but let’s give ourselves some credit. We are generous in what we do because we are putting our bodies into an experience. We are doing this for something bigger than us, and that is the story that we’re telling.

What have been some of the more challenging or difficult moments for you, either in your career or your recent series?

Zellweger: Trying not to do what you’re feeling in the moment sometimes, because it’s not appropriate to what you’re telling. That happens in most shows, most things that you do. I think everybody experiences it where you’re bringing something from home and it doesn’t belong on the set. It’s impossible to leave it behind when you walk in because it’s bigger than you are in that moment.

Banks: I would say that the thing that I worked on the most for “The Better Sister” was [understanding] sobriety. I’m not sober. I love a bubbly rosé. So it really did bring up how much I think about drinking and how social it is and what that ritual is for me, and how this character is thinking about it every day and deciding every day to stay sober or not. I am also a huge fan of AA and sobriety programs. I think they’re incredible tools for everybody who works those programs. I was grateful for the access to all of that as I was making the series. But that’s what you get to do in TV. You get to explore episode by episode. You get to play out a lot more than just three acts.

Stephen Graham of “Adolescence.”

Stephen, about the continuous single shot. It seems like it’s an incredibly difficult and complex way to shoot a series. Why do it?

Graham: It’s exceptionally difficult, I’m not going to lie. It’s like a swan glides across the water beautifully, but the legs are going rapidly underneath. A lot of it is done in preparation. We spend a whole week learning the script, and then the second week is just with the camera crew and the rest of the crew. It’s a choreography that you work out, getting an idea of where they want the camera to go, and the opportunity to embody the space ourselves.

Cohen: That reminds me of a bit of doing the undercover movies that I do because you have one take. … I did a scene where I’m wearing a bulletproof vest. There were a lot of the people in the audience who’d gone to this rally, a lot of them had machine guns. We knew they were going to get angry, but you’ve got to do the scene. You’ve got one time to get the scene right. But you also go, “OK, those guys have got guns. They’re trying to storm the stage. I haven’t quite finished the scene. When do I leave?” But you’ve got to get the scene. I could get shot, but that’s not important.

Henry: There’s a certain level of sociopathy.

Slate: I feel like I’m never on my mark, and it was always a very kind camera operator being like, “Hey, Jenny, you weren’t in the shot shoulder-wise.” I feel like such an idiot. Part of it is working through lifelong, longstanding feelings of “I’m a fool and my foolishness is going to make people incredibly angry with me.” And then really still wanting to participate and having no real certainty that I’m going to be able to do anything but just make all of my fears real. Part of the thing that I love about performance is I just want to experience the version of myself that does not collapse into useless fragments when I face the thing that scares me the most. I do that, and then I feel the appetite for performance again.

Do you see yourself in roles when you’re watching other people’s films or TV show?

Graham: At the end of the day, we’re all big fans of acting. That’s why we do it. Because when we were young, we were inspired by people on the screen, or we were inspired by places where we could put ourselves and lose our imaginations.

We have a lot of t— in this industry. But I think if we fight hard enough, we can come through. Do you know what I mean? It’s people that are here for the right reasons. It’s a collective. Acting is not a game of golf. It’s a team. It’s in front and it’s behind the camera. I think it’s important that we nourish that.

Henry: And remember that none of us are t—.

Bardem: What is a t—? I may be one of them and I don’t know it.

Graham: I’ll explain it to you later.

Unlike generations of Mexican children before and after him, actor Pablo Cruz Guerrero didn’t grow up watching the hugely popular sitcoms created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños, the late writer, producer and performer better known as “Chespirito” or “Little Shakespeare.”

It’s a wonder, considering that at peak, Gómez Bolaños’ family-friendly programs were watched by over 300 million people worldwide, and they remain pop culture pillars across Latin America — even in Portuguese-speaking Brazil — 50 years after they first aired.

The programs’ influence also extends to the U.S. among diasporic communities, enduring through reruns that periodically introduce his characters to new viewers. The catchphrases Gómez Bolaños penned have also become ingrained in the vernacular of many countries.

His most popular creation, “El Chavo del Ocho,” centers on an orphan boy (which he played) living in a courtyard apartment complex filled with peculiar neighbors. Then there’s “El Chapulín Colorado,” a satirical take on tights-wearing superheroes, where Gómez Bolaños plays an inept though goodhearted paladin (chapulín means grasshopper in Mexico).

That Cruz Guerrero, 41, wasn’t familiar with these landmark shows or characters is all the more shocking because he’s now embodied Gómez Bolaños in the new bioseries “Chespirito: Not Really on Purpose” (“Chespirito: Sin querer queriendo”), streaming on Max starting Thursday with new episodes weekly.

Pablo Cruz Guerrero stars as Mexican comedic writer, producer and performer Roberto Gómez Bolaños in Max’s “Chespirito: Not Really on Purpose.”

(Max)

The actor’s lack of nostalgic attachment for the universe of physical comedy, wordplay and social commentary that Chespirito created gave him a leg up when auditioning, he believes.

“I want to convince myself that this was the one thing that allowed me to gain objectivity about the story,” he says in Spanish during a recent video call from Mexico City. “Had I been a fan, I would have been ridden with nerves when approaching the character.”

It was casting director Isabel Cortázar who first saw Cruz Guerrero’s potential, and in mid-2023, asked him to audition for the part. “Before receiving her call, I would have never seen myself as Chespirito,” he says. “No one had ever told me before that I looked like him.”

Cruz Guerrero has been consistently acting for over 20 years in films (“El Estudiante,” “From Prada to Nada”) and TV. More recently, he played a memorable antagonist in the second and third seasons of Netflix’s “Luis Miguel: The Series,” another bioseries about the famed Mexican singer played by Diego Boneta.

As to why he didn’t watch Chespirito’s work during his childhood, Cruz Guerrero hypothesizes that because his parents lived in Los Angeles for three years before he and his siblings were born, they were more interested in culture produced outside of Mexico. Instead, they took them to the cinema, to outdoor concerts and museum exhibits.

Ironically, Cruz Guerrero has appeared on several Televisa productions over the years, the same storied network that produced Chespirito’s work.

“In middle school, I had a social and comedic disadvantage because many of my friends knew all of Chespirito’s jokes and imitated the characters’ voices, and I couldn’t follow along,” Cruz Guerrero says.

When offered a chance to vie for the role, he consumed as much Chespirito content as he could find online, whether it was of Gómez Bolaños playing his characters or interviews he gave.

“In middle school, I had a social and comedic disadvantage because many of my friends knew all of Chespirito’s jokes and imitated the characters’ voices, and I couldn’t follow along,” Pablo Cruz Guerrero says.

(Carlos Alvarez-Montero / For The Times)

The arduous audition process required Cruz Guerrero to appear every Tuesday for about seven weeks for a variety of tests. Beyond doing scenes from the episodes of “Chespirito,” each meeting would add more elements that got him closer to Gómez Bolaños: He tried on the costumes, interacted with the actors who would play his children, he shaved his beard and tried on the prosthetic nose, contact lenses and receding hairline required for the role.

And even then, as the weeks dragged on, Cruz Guerrero wasn’t certain he’d be picked, especially after sharing with the family of Gómez Bolaños, who are involved in the production, his neophyte status on everything Chespirito.

“I could read on their faces they were thinking, ‘Are we making the right decision with someone who doesn’t genuinely love our father’s legacy already?’” the actor recalls.

Ultimately, Cruz Guerrero won them over because he was able to closely replicate the mannerisms and voice of the real Chespirito. Gómez Bolaños’ physicality called to mind silent film era icons such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

“I felt like if I tried to play around with my feet and knees when I walked, not only did I lose a little bit of height to get closer to Roberto’s height, but it also put me in a position to feel a little more playful with my body,” says Cruz Guerrero while wiggling his arms.

Roberto Gómez Fernandez, Chespirito’s son, admits he initially had doubts about Cruz Guerrero. The show had been in the works for about four years at that point, two of which had been spent searching for the right actors to recreate Gómez Bolaños’ world.

Slowly, as Cruz Guerrero refined his performance and the makeup got him closer to Chespirito’s image, Gómez Fernandez became convinced they had found their man.

“I saw my father in him,” says Gómez Fernandez on a recent Zoom chat, “during complex situations in a scene and in a little wink or a glance that Pablo did.”

The family’s approval fueled him. “They would say to me, ‘I just heard my dad through you. I just had a conversation with my dad. I just shook his hand and gave him a hug,” says Cruz Guerrero, who recalls being deeply moved. “That empowered me to feel more in his skin and not feel self-doubt because of my previous distance.”

Once he officially landed the role, Cruz Guerrero immersed himself in Gómez Bolaños’ personal and professional life via his autobiography, “Sin querer queriendo,” which lends the series its title. It functioned as a link between the actor and the creator, who died in 2014.

“I was trying to establish a metaphysical dialogue through the words he had written and edited himself in the book,” Cruz Guerrero says. “I asked him questions, and I feel like we had very beautiful conversations thanks to the book.”

Many of the pointed questions that Cruz Guerrero sought answers to in the text revolved around fatherhood, namely the elusive notion of work-life balance.

“In our careers, there are moments of beautiful enlightenment where you’re creating and having a great time,” he says. “However, you’re also aware that you’re fulfilling a contract, and chasing financial compensation. This means that you’re investing time and energy and you often prioritize the professional instead of being at home and you miss your family.”

That struggle became rather personal for the actor during this process.

“I found out I was going to be a father for the first time the same week I found out I was going to play Roberto,” recalls Cruz Guerrero. “I wanted to absorb knowledge from him about his experience as a father and the experiences I was about to embark on playing him.”

While the series features moments where Cruz Guerrero dons the emblematic attire of Chavo del Ocho and Chapulín Colorado, the focus is on the real man behind them.

Andrea Noli, left, Miguel Islas, Paola Montes de Oca and Pablo Cruz Guerrero in a scene from “Chespirito.” The series is less about the characters Roberto Gómez Bolaños was famous for and more about the real man behind them.

(Max)

The book also served as the foundation for Gómez Fernandez and his sister Paulina to write the episodes’ screenplays. The two are also producers and were involved in every decision about the project.

For Roberto Gómez Fernandez, the challenge was for the series not to become a solemn, saintly tribute to the larger-than-life figure their father was.

“I had to remember that I wasn’t thinking about my dad, but about the character of Roberto Gómez Bolaños,” he says. “They weren’t real-life people because you have to transform them into characters, and sometimes you have to pull some strings to make the dramatic dynamics more effective.”

And yet, despite having fictionalized aspects, Gómez Fernandez believes that the series offers truthfulness about his father’s essence as a person.

“I think we achieved it, but along the way, we had to undress the character’s successes and failures, many of which had consequences in his life,” Gómez Fernandez says. “Some things turned out alright for him, but others went wrong, and he also hurt people.”

It’s not lost on Cruz Guerrero that someone like him, who didn’t previously revere Chespirito’s genius, wound up taking on the task of bringing his story to the screen.

“In moments of fear, insecurity and doubt, I would ask myself, ‘Oh, man, how did I end up here?’ And then it was all resolved with laughter because in front of me I would read the title of the show, ‘Not Really on Purpose,’” he says with a knowing smile.

After more than two decades mostly appearing in supporting roles, Cruz Guerrero is basking in what’s undoubtedly the most important credit of his career so far.

“I’m especially grateful to the family, who chose me to play this beloved character, who is obviously part of their personal story,” Cruz Guerrero says. “I live this moment with great gratitude, so thank you to Roberto Gómez Bolaños.”

California lawmakers on Tuesday moved one step closer to placing more guardrails around artificial intelligence-powered chatbots.

The Senate passed a bill that aims to make chatbots used for companionship safer after parents raised concerns that virtual characters harmed their childrens’ mental health.

The legislation, which now heads to the California State Assembly, shows how state lawmakers are tackling safety concerns surrounding AI as tech companies release more AI-powered tools.

“The country is watching again for California to lead,” said Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista), one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill, on the Senate floor.

At the same time, lawmakers are trying to balance concerns that they could be hindering innovation. Groups opposed to the bill such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation say the legislation is too broad and would run into free speech issues, according to a Senate floor analysis of the bill.

Under Senate Bill 243, operators of companion chatbot platforms would remind users at least every three hours that the virtual characters aren’t human. They would also disclose that companion chatbots might not be suitable for some minors.

Platforms would also need to take other steps such as implementing a protocol for addressing suicidal ideation, suicide or self-harm expressed by users. That includes showing users suicide prevention resources.

The operator of these platforms would also report the number of times a companion chatbot brought up suicide ideation or actions with a user, along with other requirements.

Dr. Akilah Weber Pierson, one of the bill’s co-authors, said she supports innovation but it also must come with “ethical responsibility.” Chatbots, the senator said, are engineered to hold people’s attention including children.

“When a child begins to prefer interacting with AI over real human relationships, that is very concerning,” said Sen. Weber Pierson (D-La Mesa).

The bill defines companion chatbots as AI systems capable of meeting the social needs of users. It excludes chatbots that businesses use for customer service.

The legislation garnered support from parents who lost their children after they started chatting with chatbots. One of those parents is Megan Garcia, a Florida mom who sued Google and Character.AI after her son Sewell Setzer III died by suicide last year.

In the lawsuit, she alleges the platform’s chatbots harmed her son’s mental health and failed to notify her or offer help when he expressed suicidal thoughts to these virtual characters.

Character.AI, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is a platform where people can create and interact with digital characters that mimic real and fictional people. The company has said that it takes teen safety seriously and rolled out a feature that gives parents more information about the amount of time their children are spending with chatbots on the platform.

Character.AI asked a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit, but a federal judge in May allowed the case to proceed.

EastEnders fans are over the moon as spoilers reveal a ‘return’ for one missing Walford resident next week

Spoilers for next week’s EastEnders tease plenty of drama to come including a return for one ‘missing’ resident. There’s trouble in paradise for a number of couples next week, as Kat and Alfie face wedding day drama. But will the day go ahead?

The BBC soap have also confirmed a rocky patch for George and Elaine as Elaine learns where her husband really was on Christmas night. The final couple confirmed to be having trouble are Patrick and Yolande Trueman (Angela Wynter). Although fans are gutted the two are having marriage troubles, they’re also overjoyed that Patrick will be making his return.

Patrick Trueman (Rudolph Walker) has been notably absent from the soap lately, although his partner Yolande has been seen in a number of storylines. She’s been a big support to Nigel Bates who has been suffering from dementia.

However, next week, the soap has confirmed Patrick will be back onscreen, but it’s not good news for him or Yolande, as she confides in Denise about their struggles. It all starts off next week with Patrick refusing to give Yolande a massage – but things quickly escalate when she raises her concerns with Denise.

She opens up about the state of her relationship with Patrick, as she fears things will never be the same between them – but will they be able to get on track?

Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter upon seeing the spoilers, one fan wrote: “Patrick and Yolande are back next week I prayed for their return!”

Patrick and Yolande tied the knot in 2004, however, things came crashing down five years later when they got divorced. The pair rekindled once again in 2023 after Yolande returned to Walford from Birmingham.

The couple recently won a British Soap Award for Best On-Screen Partnership. The soap scooped up eight awards on the night, including Best British Soap, Best Single Episode and Scene of the Year for Angie Watts’ surprise return.

On the night, fans claimed there was an apparent mixed reaction to Rudolph and Angela’s win. However, fellow star Colin Salmon has now had his say on the incident.

Colin, who plays the role of George Knight in the long-running soap, voiced his opinion on X/ Twitter. Trying to explain exactly what had happened, he said: “Just want to clarify; No one was booing Rudi and Angela at the@SoapAwards we were singing RUUUDI , RUUUDI , RUUUDI. “

He added the interaction had “obviously confused some people”. “Appreciate some were concerned, as we should be, but it’s all good,” he added before signing off: “‘#NoDrama#WeLovePatrickandYolande @bbceastenders.”

EastEnders airs Mondays to Thursdays at 7:30pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

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ABC’s “Will Trent” is no ordinary police procedural.

“There’s a thousand cop shows,” said Ramón Rodriguez, who portrays the show’s main character, Will Trent. “How do you make this one stand out?”

The broadcast drama series, which also airs on Hulu, centers special agent Trent: a dapper investigator whose instinctual crime-solving skills render him essential to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But beneath the three-piece suit, there’s a more complex side to Trent, who navigates the residual trauma from being abandoned at birth and growing up in the Atlanta foster care system. He is also dyslexic.

“One of the exciting things when I came onto the show was not knowing where this character was from,” said Rodriguez, 45. “Trent was very much [written as] a colorless character.”

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rodriguez greeted me on a Zoom call from his present home in Southern California, while wearing a New York Knicks cap. Before “Will Trent,” he previously played the first main Hispanic character on the HBO series “The Wire,” and appeared in films such as 2009’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “G20,” a thriller featuring Viola Davis, which premiered April 10 on Amazon Prime Video.

Since the 2023 premiere of “Will Trent,” Rodriguez has molded his beloved character in many ways; he’s a hard-nosed detective with a mushy side, which is most evident in scenes with his pocket-sized chihuahua named Betty. Based on Karin Slaughter’s New York Times-bestselling novel series “Will Trent,” showrunners Liz Heldens and Daniel Thomsen organically tailored the titular role to reflect Rodriguez’s real-life Puerto Rican identity. It’s a major win for Latinos in an industry that otherwise lacks Latino-led programming.

“Once we run out of feeling fresh, creative, excited and inspired, then I think we start phoning it in,” said Rodriguez. “But that’s something I’m not interested in and I know my partners aren’t either.”

Rodriguez has taken on roles behind the camera as well. He directed “I’m a Guest Here,” the first episode of Season 3, which wrapped earlier this month; he was also named an executive producer. “I really wanted to be a part of the creative collaboration of creating this character in this show,” said Rodriguez.

When Season 3 dropped a bombshell regarding Trent’s biological father, it paved the way for a nail-biting Season 4, which was confirmed earlier this year.

This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity. It also reveals Season 3 spoilers.

In the books, Will Trent isn’t Puerto Rican, but this series is peeking into your own Puerto Rican identity. What are your thoughts on that?

It was a topic that they were curious about exploring. Where does Will come from as an orphan who grew up in the foster care system? Identity becomes a focal point for someone like that. Again [him being Puerto Rican] isn’t in the books, which is kind of exciting. We’ve been able to separate and say that the books are the books.

It wasn’t something that we were trying to sort of check a box and say, “Great, Will’s heritage is Puerto Rican.” It was a very organic explanation of this character discovering who he is.

When you were cast for the lead, did you ever picture the show as what it is today?

 You never know what’s gonna work and why it’s gonna work. You don’t have control of a lot of things in this business. The one thing I do have control over is my work, what I can bring to it, what I try to do. This is the first time I’ve been on a show that’s gone on for this long from the pilot.

If you would’ve asked me that, is this gonna be the show that goes past one season? I probably would’ve said, “I don’t think so.” And it’s nothing against the show, you just don’t know. It took a minute for me to be fully convinced, but I’m so grateful that they were willing to continue having conversations with me and that they were really willing to have me on as a partner because that was important to me.

It doesn’t feel like the show hinges on those elements of identity. Why is it important to keep that balance in this procedural show?

[Solving cases is] another aspect of the show that I know audiences love. I just think the things that tend to pull our hearts to the things that are emotional and personal things, what someone’s struggling with or how are they overcoming it.

In Season 3, we have a really pivotal moment where Will accidentally shoots a bad guy, but ends up killing a young boy by accident. That case ended up changing the rest of the season — he was not able to recover from that event of having the boy die in his arms. That was Episode 11 and that will likely go into Season 4.

Your dog Betty also shines in Season 3. We get to hear her voice for the first time which happens during a fun hallucination scene. What was it like to film that episode?

That was two episodes after this tragic episode I just described, which is crazy, right? We wanted to mix levity and humor with our heavy drama and emotional stuff.

So as Will was entering this case that involved a cult, he gets caught undercover and in that process he gets drugged. Liz Heldens, one of our showrunners, had been dying to find a way to get me to dance on this show, and I was like “Listen: Will Trent is an awkward individual, he’s not someone that’s out here dancing.” She was like, “Well, what if that’s a hallucination?” I was like, “That’s brilliant!” Anything can happen while he’s tripping.

I remember I was walking on set and one of our production assistants, Tim, had read the script and said, “What if Betty talks?” So I pitched that to Liz and she topped it and went, “Well, what if Betty’s British?”

You made your directorial debut in Season 3. How was that experience for you?

I felt like a kid in a candy store. By Season 3, I really understood the character and what works with our show, where our strengths are. I just got to be me in certain scenes, because at the start of the [third] season Will has left the [Georgia Bureau of Investigation], he’s got a beard and he’s in a T-shirt, jeans and curly hair.

It was also fun to direct new cast members. We introduced Gina Rodriguez, who played Marion Alba, and Antwayn Hopper, who played Rafel Wexford. Which was really fun. I’d be like: “No notes.” [Laughs.]

Will you be directing in Season 4?

 I will definitely be directing at least one episode next season. It makes the most sense for me to direct the premiere as I did this past season. I love that pressure of having to set the bar for a season.

What can audiences expect for the upcoming season?

We’re about to begin these serious conversations. There were some pretty serious cliffhangers at the end of Season 3, where we find out Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen) is pregnant, and Will is definitely not the father, so that’s gonna be something to explore. Amanda Wagner (Sonja Sohn), who is a maternal figure for Will, is in the hospital bed. We just discovered his dad, [Sheriff Caleb Roussard], which we don’t know too much about, so I’d want to know more about the character and what happened with the mom. There’s just so many questions that we will get to explore — I mean, is there new love in Will’s life?

AN EastEnders legend has joined Emmerdale as a ‘dark and villainous’ new character.

The ITV soap has snapped up Joe Absolom, whose past work includes a three-year run in EastEnders.

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Joe, 46, is joining Emmerdale this summer, playing the role of newcomer Ray,.

Introduced as old acquaintance of Mackenzie’s (Laurence Robb), Ray arrives at the farm claiming to be selling farm machinery.

But it’s not long before the character’s true, drug dealing ways come to light.

While he possesses a calm and collected exterior, it’s clear a menacing strike hides just below the surface.

Discussing his new role, Joe said: “Well what an honour to join such a talented team at Emmerdale!

“It’s an iconic show and I’m grateful to be part of it.”

He added: “I can’t wait to see what’s in stock for Ray!” 

Emmerdale producer Laura Shaw says: “We are thrilled to welcome Joe Absolom to the cast.

“It’s fantastic to have such a high calibre and immensely talented actor join our wonderful team to play the role of Ray.

“Charming, charismatic and effortlessly likeable, Ray is an extremely complex character who very quickly shows his dark and villainous side to some of our most loved villagers, leaving them in no doubt as to what he’s capable of.”

Joe played the regular role of Matthew Rose in EastEnders from 1997 to 2000.

In the character’s most prominent storyline, Matthew was framed for murder and wrongfully imprisoned.

Joe is also well-known as Al Large in Doc Martin and Andy Warren in The Bay.

He recently starred in ITV crime drama Code of Silence, featuring Rose Ayling-Ellis in the lead role.

Emmerdale airs 7.30pm, weeknights on ITV1 and STV or from 7.00am on ITVX and STV Player. 

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There has never been a shortage of TV series that take place in Los Angeles, the longtime hub of the American television industry and its players. But the 2025 Emmy season features such a wealth of shows set and shot in and around L.A. that we couldn’t resist spotlighting how several of them use the iconic locale we call home.

‘Shrinking’

Jason Segel, left, Jessica Williams, Christa Miller and Ted McGinley in “Shrinking.”

(Apple)

The Apple TV+ comedy, which follows an interconnected group of co-workers, friends and neighbors, is set mainly in Pasadena and Altadena. Location manager David Flannery, a fifth-generation Pasadena native, notes, “So often [these cities] play for everywhere else in the world. But we want to show exactly where we are — which is just a little more specific than general L.A. — and that the characters are grounded in very real places.” These sites have included the Rose Bowl, Pasadena City Hall, Pasadena’s Central Park (featuring the landmark Castle Green building) and the South Pasadena train station. The Laird and Bishop family homes, with their adjoining backyards, may look like a set but are actually neighboring Altadena houses, both of which survived the Eaton fire.

‘Only Murders in the Building’

Martin Short, left, Selena Gomez and Steve Martin in “Only Murders in the Building.”

(Eric McCandless / Disney)

Although Hulu’s Emmy-winning comic mystery is the ultimate New York tale, its Season 4 opener sent its crime-solving lead trio to Tinseltown to pursue a movie adaptation of their popular podcast. Co-creator and showrunner John Hoffman, calling in during the show’s Season 5 shoot, says, “Last season had to start in L.A. It really kicks off a season that is specific to cinema, to moving images.” Filming took place on the classic Paramount Studios lot, at the historic Il Borghese condo building in Hancock Park and at an “ultra-glamorous, deeply L.A.” Hollywood Hills home, which served as studio exec Bev Melon’s party house.

‘Nobody Wants This’

Kristen Bell and Adam Brody in “Nobody Wants This.”

(Adam Rose / Netflix)

Creator-showrunner Erin Foster can’t imagine her Netflix rom-com about a progressive rabbi and a gentile sex podcaster set anywhere but her native Los Angeles. “You have to write what you know, and that’s what I know,” she says by phone from her West Hollywood home. “In L.A., people are following their dreams, so it says a lot about who someone is. I think the same applies to locations in a TV show: They all signal where [the characters] are in their life and who they are.” Some of these illustrative locales have included Westwood’s Sinai Temple, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown, the Los Feliz 3 Theatre, Calamigos Ranch in Malibu and WeHo’s Pleasure Chest sex shop.

‘The Studio’

Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara in “The Studio.”

(Apple)

Seth Rogen and company’s raucous creation about a beleaguered movie studio chief is rooted in firsthand experience. “Seth knows this town very, very well,” says supervising location manager Stacey Brashear. “He and [co-creator] Evan Goldberg wrote in 90% of the locations, including the [John] Lautner-designed, Midcentury Modern houses that studio executives like to collect.” Among these eye-popping sites are the Silvertop house above the Silver Lake Reservoir and the Harvey House in the Hollywood Hills. Adds Brashear, “I feel like our locations are actual characters in the show.” Among the Apple TV+ series’ many other L.A. locations: the Warner Bros. studio lot, the Smoke House Restaurant in Burbank, Lake Hollywood Park and the Sunset Strip’s Chateau Marmont.

‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’

Chloë Sevigny and Javier Bardem in “Monsters: The Lyle Aand Erik Menendez Story.”

(Netflix)

This Netflix limited series revisits the 1989 murder of wealthy Beverly Hills couple José and Kitty Menendez by sons Erik and Lyle, a crime notoriously connected to Los Angeles. “It was such a period of decadence and grandeur, and Beverly Hills was kind of the poster child for that,” says production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson. “I wanted to recapture the [town’s] glamour and celebrity culture.” He also notes, of L.A.’s diverse architecture, “You can get quite a few different looks all in the same place.” These “looks” included a grand Hancock Park-area home standing in for the Mendendez mansion, Koreatown’s Wilshire Colonnade office complex, a 1970s-built Encino bank building, Beverly Hills’ Will Rogers Memorial Park and the former Sunset Strip site of Spago, restored to look as it did in its heyday.

‘Hacks’

Megan Stalter left, and Hannah Einbinder at the Americana at Brand in “Hacks.”

(Kenny Laubbacher / Max)

Unlike past seasons, in which L.A. often subbed for Las Vegas, Season 4 of “Hacks” is mostly shot and set in Los Angeles. Says Lucia Aniello, co-creator with Paul W. Downs and Jen Stasky, “Much of [the season] is getting back to the roots of L.A. comedy. It really is a love letter to Los Angeles — and to the comedy world.” Adds Downs, “The show is a lot about people outside of the industry looking in. By being in L.A., we got to really explore what that means.” Some key locations: CBS Television City, the Lenny Kravitz-designed Stanley House, the Americana at Brand and Echo Park’s Elysian Theater; the Altadena estate doubling for Deborah Vance’s Bel-Air mansion was lost in the Eaton fire.

‘Running Point’

Kate Hudson and Max Greenfield in “Running Point.”

(Katrina Marcinowski / Netflix)

Loosely based on the life of Lakers President Jeanie Buss, this Netflix comedy is “filled with a lot of L.A. DNA,” says co-creator and showrunner David Stassen. He adds that, like Buss, the show’s star, Kate Hudson, “is also part of a dynastic L.A. family. Plus, she knows Jeanie, she loves the Lakers and she grew up going to games.” Though much of the season was filmed downtown at Los Angeles Center Studios, location work included the Pacific Coast Highway south of Venice (where Cam, played by Justin Theroux, crashes his Porsche), downtown L.A.’s elegant Hotel Per La and homes in Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills. The L.A. skyline gets quite the workout here as well.

‘Forever’

Lovie Simone in “Forever.”

(Elizabeth Morris / Netflix)

Netflix’s reimagining of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel unfolds in 2018 Los Angeles, where it evocatively explores first love between teens Justin and Keisha. Showrunner and L.A. native Mara Brock Akil considers her adaptation “a love letter to Los Angeles and to the idyllic life we’re all trying to live in this city, where dreams are not isolated to one particular neighborhood.” Key parts of the story take place around Keisha’s home in the View Park-Windsor Hills area, with the show’s many other L.A. locations including Ladera Park, St. Mary’s Academy in Inglewood, the Grove and the Original Farmers Market, Griffith Park and the Santa Monica Pier. Adds Akil, “A lot of people [in L.A.] are moving around on public transportation, which I wanted to shine a light on too.”

Emmerdale star Amy Walsh has revealed one character will be put in the frame for the murder of Nate Robinson on the ITV soap, with real killer John Sugden undetected

One Emmerdale resident could be framed for the murder of Nate Robinson in upcoming episodes, but it’s not who you might think.

Despite clues that Cain Dingle could have been to blame for the death leading to him being questioned by police, it’s not him who faces accusations. John Sugden murdered Nate and dumped his body in a stream, and next week the death is finally revealed.

But soon people start pointing fingers at each other, and some future scenes will see one character face the heat. Tracy Robinson actress Amy Walsh has revealed that her character faces the blame, after some well placed hints.

Things have been “seeded” for weeks if not months, all to suggest a motive for Tracy killing Nate. It seems people pick up on these hints, and soon Tracy faces being framed for the brutal murder of her husband.

Of course Tracy was the only who was messaged by ‘Nate’ from Shetland, and then recently she’s been using the credit card that was sent to her address. She also revealed how Nate had organised for his belongings to be collected, and she sent daughter Frankie a birthday present ‘from Nate’.

READ MORE: Emmerdale exit ‘sealed’ in earth-shattering twist villagers won’t see coming

Teasing what leads to Tracy coming under fire, she hinted John might frame her given it is somehow discovered that Nate’s phone has been in the village this whole time. She spilled: “I had a meeting months ago, it was all to do with Tracy and the cost of living, and her stealing from Pollard.

“I thought, ‘oh gosh, is this my exit? Do I go prison?’, they said no it’s not, and that finding out the Nate thing is further down the line. Up until it came about that Tracy might be framed for it or a suspect for it I didn’t know anything about it. It came off the back of another story where I was asking a question about something that we’d shot.

“They said that has to happen for this and I was like, ‘Oh right, great’.” She confirmed it had been “seeded” for a while all the things that would eventually make Tracy a suspect.

She explained: “Just little bits like Tracy using Nate’s credit card cos that plants her further in the frame for having a motive to get rid of him.”

She added: “There’s a theory the killer must be in the village cos the phone was there all this time. No one thinks it’s anyone else.” Cain does face some questioning though, with Tracy growing convinced he’s to blame and could be setting her up.

Tracy and her sister Vanessa Woodfield reveal all about Nate and Cain’s fight, and soon the police have questions. Amy revealed: “[He’s] really, very emotional about it and it’s just not very Cain is it. So it strikes a chord and Vanessa is like gosh I’ve never seen him like that.

“In that moment Tracy thinks oh my God I’ve just figured it out. It’s not sadness, it’s guilt. It’s full, real emotion and she runs with it.”

Emmerdale airs weeknights at 7:30pm on ITV1 and ITVX, with an hour-long episode on Thursdays. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .

This story is full of spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, especially the finale.

Season 2 of HBO’s “The Last of Us” ends with the ultimate cliffhanger (seriously, if you have not seen and do not want to know, please stop reading right now): An Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) vs. Ellie (Bella Ramsey) face-off in which only Abby has a weapon. As Ellie cries out, a gun goes off and … we are sent back in time to Day 1, Abby’s viewpoint.

So if any of y’all were looking for some kind of closure, emotional or narrative, well, you have got a bit of a wait.

The episode itself played out like a mini-epic. Picking up where last week’s mostly flashback episode ended, Ellie returns to the theater to find Jesse (Young Mazino) tending to Dina (Isabela Merced), who got an arrow through the leg, courtesy of the Seraphites, in Episode 5. When Dina refuses an anesthetic slug of alcohol during the proceedings, Jesse gets the wind up. As he and Ellie then set out to find Tommy (Gabriel Luna), he (kinda) tricks Ellie into revealing Dina’s pregnancy.

That admission only adds fuel to the tension between Ellie, with her obsessive need to make Abby pay for killing Joel, and Jesse, who is angry at Ellie for putting her personal desire for revenge above the needs of the community back in Jackson. High words are spoken before the two split up, with Jesse going to search for Tommy, Ellie to continue tracking Abby.

After a frankly weird hero’s journey in which she braves stormy seas and faces execution by the Seraphites, Ellie makes it to the abandoned aquarium to find Abby. There she surprises Mel (Ariela Barer) and Owen (Spencer Lord), two of the former Fireflies who were with Abby when she killed Joel (Pedro Pascal). When Owen reaches for a gun, Ellie fires, shooting him through the throat. The bullet also, alas, hits Mel, who reveals her advanced pregnancy and, as she bleeds out, begs Ellie to cut the baby out. Horrified, Ellie can do no such thing, and Mel dies even as Jesse and Tommy show up.

Ellie (Bella Ramsey) also has to battle the elements in “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale.

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

It’s a powerful and terrible scene. Upon their return to the safety of the theater, Ellie is, understandably, very shaken and appears to be rethinking the wisdom of her revenge tour when Abby shows up and kills Jesse (sob). As Ellie takes responsibility for Mel and Owen’s deaths and struggles to explain, we see her original fury reflected in Abby’s face. She points the gun at Ellie, a shot rings out and the story resets on Day 1 of the outbreak.

The Times’ Lorraine Ali, Tracy Brown and Mary McNamara discuss the finale and the season that came before it.

McNamara: As someone who has not played the game but has watched a lot of television, I am going to make the wild guess that Ellie is not dead. Not that I expect to discover this for quite a while, as the final scene indicates that Season 3 will be giving us Abby’s backstory before bringing us (one hopes) back to the theater and the series’ present.

This finale, like much of what preceded it, felt both rushed and oddly slow. This season has been very much (and at times too obviously) focused on Ellie’s growth, as a person and a main character. And with the exception of her love for Dina, I’m not sure how much is there. That Ellie is relentless has been made abundantly clear; ditto the fact that she is confused about her purpose in life. But I admit I was relieved when Jesse read her the riot act about how this mission of vengeance put so many people in danger, including and especially the woman Ellie claims to love.

The stakes in Season 1 were very clear — get Ellie to where she can be used to make a cure — even if they were subverted in the end. This season, the main tension appears to be more about Ellie becoming mature enough to accept that not all heroes have to make dramatic sacrifices or win a blood feud.

That’s a fine message, but it required a lot of attention on her emotional growth, which honestly seemed to occur mostly in the final few minutes, while offering only tantalizing slivers of the larger forces around her. How do you introduce a crazy cult and not offer any real explanation for it? How do you enlist Jeffrey Wright (or for that matter, Hettienne Park) as WLF commanders and then give them so little to do? Not to mention poor Mel and Owen, who are sacrificed, apparently, merely to broaden Ellie’s worldview.

I realize that some of this is about staying true(ish) to the game, which I understand offers different viewpoints, but even with the action-packed finale, it’s hard not to feel like Season 2 was simply a preamble to Season 3. What do you think, “Last of Us” player Tracy Brown?

Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) remains a mystery in “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale.

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

Brown: I have to agree with you, Mary — the finale’s pacing felt a bit awkward as it barreled its way toward the perspective shift into Abby’s side of the story that will likely be the focus of Season 3, while also trying to pack in familiar moments from the game. I also think you’re feeling a version of the confusion and frustration that “The Last of Us: Part II” players felt when Ellie and Abby’s showdown at the theater abruptly cut to something completely different and you’re suddenly being forced to play as the character you’ve spent hours trying to hunt down.

In the game, up until that cliffhanger, you’ve primarily been playing as Ellie outside of a few sequences before Joel’s death. Players don’t learn much about the Washington Liberation Front or the Seraphites or their conflict until they get to Abby’s side of the story. And when you’re playing a game, you’re used to knowing only as much as the character you’re playing as and learning more about any enemies as you go. You’re also much more mission-oriented — as great as a game’s story is, you’re main focus is gathering as much information as you can to accomplish your goal. The mission and the themes are a bit more straightforward in the first “Last of Us” game.

In “The Last of Us: Part II,” there’s a bait and switch. You start the game’s main storyline playing as Ellie, with the assumption that your mission is to get revenge, only to find yourself suddenly playing as Abby. Because “Part II” is more about an exploration of trauma and cycles of violence, Abby and her story have to be more than something you learn about as Ellie. In the game, the perspective shift is essential and revelatory because, navigating any discomfort while playing as Abby is part of the experience. It’s something dependent on the unique way players become attached to characters they play as.

In television, stories can unfold differently. Because audiences are not playing as Ellie, they can be introduced to Abby’s ties to the events in Salt Lake City and characters like Isaac (Wright) much sooner than in the game because we’re not locked into one point of view. And that freedom brings its own challenges. I should also mention that as acclaimed as the franchise is, “Part II” was a bit more divisive among players too. Lorraine, what did you think about the finale?

Ali: You’ve both expressed many of the same feelings I have about the finale and about Season 2 in general. Does that mean I can have the night off? If I took my cues from Ellie, I’d do just that. Ellie predictably put her own interests above everyone and everything else, which didn’t leave much room for an interesting story twist or character growth in the Season 2 finale. To Mary’s point about pacing, Episode 7 spent precious time hammering away on what we already know: Ellie’s need for revenge put everyone who cares about her in danger. Poor Dina. The only way Jesse was getting that crossbow bolt out of her leg was pulling it straight through. The credits are nearly ready to roll by the time Ellie realizes her single-minded quest is as barbaric as Abby’s killing of Joel, but not before she gunned down a pregnant woman.

Tracy, I wonder if the trouble the show had picking out where to spend its time is partly a game-to-TV adaptation problem. You mentioned the shifting perspectives in the game, of players seeing the world through Ellie’s and then Abby’s eyes. But serieswatchers are a passive audience and that left the show with a lot of options to tackle and/or leave out. The finale’s hopscotching from scenario to scenario appeared like it was born out of duty rather than purpose. Ellie’s choppy boat ride, the rogue wave washing her ashore, her capture and release at the hands of the cult — all were colorful and dramatic but felt abrupt and even extraneous to the story. That said, the decaying Costco storefront was a nice touch even if it was totally random.

Lastly, I loved the Seattle-centric soundtrack and poster choices of grunge bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. But a lot of great female bands came out of the Pacific Northwest too, and I can’t help but feel the feral screams of 7 Year B— would have been a perfect soundtrack for Ellie’s rage. So what do we all think about the last moments of the finale, which set us up for Season 3?

Jesse (Young Mazino) is not too pleased with Dina (Isabela Merced) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in “The Last of Us” Season 2 finale.

McNamara: I love the granular music criticism, Lorraine! For the life of me, I could not figure out what to make of Ellie’s brief capture by the Seraphites, which felt a lot like finale padding — don’t forget the crazy cult in the woods about which we know nothing yet! — or even her “Twelfth Night”-like near-drowning. (“What country, friends, is this?”)

I can see how the switch from Ellie to Abby might work in the game — you’ll never understand your “enemy” until you walk a mile in her shoes — but for a series to flip viewpoints seasonally (as opposed to episodically) is a big ask for viewers, especially those not familiar with the game.

With the exception of Ellie and Dina’s burgeoning relationship, much of this season felt like a big teaser reel for Season 3. Ramsey is a talented actor, but the task of carrying the show by portraying a recognizable teen on a complicated existential journey in the middle of a life-or-death adventure tale is a formidable one, especially without the benefit of an older, wiser guide/co-star. But then no one said adapting a game to a series would be easy.

As for the final moments, well, as I said, I don’t think Ellie’s dead, though Jesse certainly is, which is tragic — he and Tommy were the real heroes of Season 2. I am intrigued by the “Day 1“-ness of the final scene. I always like when postapocalyptic tales take the time to explain how it all went down. So I will be counting the months to see what happens next, which I suppose is what every TV writer wants.

Brown: I’ll refrain from spoiling Ellie’s fate here, even though the game with the answer came out in 2020! But I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the cut to Abby’s “Seattle Day 1” signals the show is likely sticking to the structure of the game — meaning Season 3 will tell Abby’s story, following the former Firefly for the same three days that Ellie has spent in the Emerald City leading up to their violent reunion. If the show stays true to the game, we won’t be seeing what happens to Ellie following that cliffhanger gunshot until the story reaches that part of “Day 3” from Abby’s perspective. Sorry, Mary!

I was a bit surprised when I realized the show was going to follow this same route, especially after it introduced Abby’s backstory so early. One of the perks of television is that it’s possible to follow the multiple storylines of more than one character, so I thought the show might try weaving Ellie and Abby’s narratives a bit more. One benefit of following the game’s road map, though, is there are distinct breaks in the overall story to build seasons around. (I’m calling it now that the Season 3 finale will be around their clash at the theater again.)

Back to Lorraine’s point, I do think that some of the struggles of this season comes down to the choices around which game moments to give space to. Some game-to-TV moments were very successful, like Joel taking Ellie to the museum for her birthday in Episode 6. Others, like Ellie taking that boat to get to the aquarium, were a bit less successful. Ellie getting tossed around those waves was a great nod to that sequence in the game, but on the show, it wasn’t as clear why she even needed to hop on the boat to begin with.

We’ve all mentioned how Dina and Ellie’s relationship has been one of the highlights of this season. Without spoiling anything, what I am most curious about is how Ellie’s excitement around Dina’s pregnancy and becoming a dad is going to affect the story to come. How about you, Lorraine, is there hope for “The Last of Us” to win you back?

Ali: There is always hope, Tracy, even in the blighted, rotting, fungus-filled world of “The Last of Us.” My meager hope for the Season 3 opener? That Ellie emerges a survivor, and her comeback scene is set to Pearl Jam’s “Alive.”

It’s 6 a.m. in Brisbane, Australia, and Kaitlyn Dever is thinking about going to the beach. Except it’s pouring rain outside, which is the only reason she had the option to check out the waves in the first place. The deluge has delayed her call time for “Godzilla x Kong: Supernova,” the monster movie she’s been shooting for the past couple of months.

Just how hard is it raining? Like a normal downpour? Or is it the kind of deluge we see in the final minutes of the season finale of “The Last of Us”?

“It’s actually pouring like the finale of ‘The Last of Us,’” Dever says, laughing.

With the beach off the menu, we have plenty of time to settle in and talk about the bruising (and possibly confusing) season finale of “The Last of Us.” Anyone thinking that the finale might feature a showdown between Dever’s character, Abby Anderson, the young woman who killed Joel (Pedro Pascal) to avenge her father’s death, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who has been hunting Abby to exact her own revenge, might be disappointed.

Abby doesn’t turn up until the episode’s last three minutes. When she does finally arrive, she ambushes Ellie. It’s not a tender reunion.

“I let you live,” Abby hisses. “And you wasted it!”

Then we hear the sound of a gunshot and the screen goes black. After a reset, we see Abby lying on a sofa in an entirely different environment, being beckoned from her respite to meet with militia leader Isaac (Jeffrey Wright). She strides to a balcony in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, the stadium now being used as a base for the Washington Liberation Front. Her entrance is positively papal, and as Abby surveys the scene, a graphic lands on the screen: Seattle Day One, a time frame we’ve already lived from Ellie’s point of view.

What the hell just happened?

[Laughs] I don’t know. I have no idea.

It looks like the show just reset and we’ll be starting Season 3 following Abby for three days, leading up to her confrontation with Ellie.

One would think, yes. But [“The Last of Us” co-creator] Craig [Mazin] hasn’t talked to me about what he’s doing. All he said to me was, “Just get ready for what’s to come because it’s going to be crazier.” He always said he wanted to make Season 2 bigger than Season 1, and he said Season 3 is going to be even bigger. I’m like, “OK. I’ll be ready.”

How did he pitch you on doing the show in the first place?

At my first meeting with Craig and Neil [Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us” game] they told me that their plan for Season 2 was Abby’s introduction to “The Last of Us” world. They told me the number of episodes, so I wasn’t super surprised about that, though I wasn’t thinking that the entire season was going to end on me. [Laughs]

So when you got the script and read that ending …

I was like, “We’re really doing this. Wow.” It’s a lot of pressure. I always think about the times in my past when I’ve done things and I’ve had one line in a scene, and it’s the most nerve-racking thing to do. Everyone else has dialogue, and you’re just thinking about your one line and how you’re going to say it and if you screw it up, the whole scene is screwed up because of your one line. It’s pretty terrifying — but thrilling too.

You’re talking about Abby telling Ellie, “You wasted it”? You really spit it out with some heat.

That’s good to know. I was going back and forth between Vancouver and L.A., so I constantly had to recalibrate and get back into the emotional intensity of Abby. That was actually the last scene I shot.

How did you find your way back into Abby’s anger?

Well, the very first scene I shot was the killing of Joel. The light one. [Laughs] So getting back into it, I’d always go back to that and Abby’s monologue, what she says to Joel before shooting him. Those words are so visceral and heartbreaking and really paint a picture. So I just kept bringing myself back to that place, how I’d been thinking about saying those words for five years.

Abby’s brutal encounter with Ellie in Seattle was the last scene Dever shot on “The Last of Us” Season 2.

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

Did you watch that Joel episode when it aired or had you already seen it?

I did watch it with my partner. But the first time I watched it, I was by myself. And before that, I had gone to do ADR [automated dialogue replacement] with Craig, and he asked, “Can I just show you a little bit of it?” And I was on the floor because I was so overwhelmed. That is the most intense episode of television I’ve ever seen. And then when I watched it later, I couldn’t believe it, even though I had experienced it myself.

You had experienced it, but you’ve said you don’t really remember filming it because it was four days after your mother’s funeral. [Dever’s mother, Kathy, died from breast cancer in February 2024.] In some ways, it must have been like you were watching it for the first time.

I had to fly out three days after her funeral. And the fourth day was that scene in the chalet with the Fireflies and Joel on the floor. So, yeah, it’s all a blur, and it felt like I got to experience it as a first-time viewer. I’d see things and go, “Oh, yeah.” Grief does a really interesting thing with your brain. It messes with your memory.

Filming the scene where you brutally kill one of the most beloved characters on television goes back to what you were saying about pressure. And to do it under those circumstances must have been overwhelming.

I was terrified. I had spent so much time contemplating my mom’s death before she died, thinking about how I wouldn’t be able to go on. I couldn’t imagine. And then it’s a heartbreaking thing to think about, how life moves on. And you have the choice to keep going or not go to Vancouver and do the show that she was so excited about me doing. And then after she passed, I realized there’s no part of me that couldn’t not do this. I had to do it for her.

How did you fight past the fear?

My dad really encouraged me. I really was terrified. And he was like, “You got this. Mom was so excited that you got to be in this show.” And luckily, the crew was so understanding and supportive. Everyone took care of me.

Then it’s 15 months later and the episode finally airs, which I’d imagine brings about a different set of worries. Did you go online to check out the reaction?

Of course I did! I kill everyone’s favorite character, the love of everyone’s life. I’d never been part of anything this massive before. Like, the whole world is watching this. I had no idea what to expect.

And what did you find?

It was more positive than I thought it would be.

I didn’t play the game, so one of my first thoughts after watching it was: Wow, gamers can keep a secret.

They can. I loved watching all those TikTok videos where people were filming their parents or partners watching and showing their reactions.

Having played the game, you’ve known about Abby and Joel for years.

My dad was playing the second game and handed me the controller and said, “Kaitlyn, you’ve got to see this.” In the game, it’s so jarring and shocking.

On TV too!

[Laughs] But with the game, after they kill Joel, all of a sudden you’re playing as a woman. And my first reaction was, “Is this Ellie? Am I playing as Ellie?” It is interesting how they take these two characters who are mirrors of each other in many ways.

Dever’s Abby surveys the action inside T-Mobile Park on “Seattle Day One.”

(Liane Hentscher / HBO)

I was thinking about how it’d be great if Season 3 would have an episode with Abby and her father that mirrored the one with Ellie and Joel.

That’s a really good idea. I hope we get to do something like that.

I have a feeling you might. Maybe you even know something about that. [Laughs]

Honestly, I can keep a secret too! I knew about Joel dying long before even Season 1 because I had met with Neil years ago when they were talking about making a movie from the game. And he was showing me the making of the second game and asked, “You want to know what happens?” And I’m like, “Oh, my God!” So I’ve been keeping this in a long time.

So you’re good at keeping a secret. Gamers know how Season 3 is likely to develop. You’ve played the game. Are you being coy?

[Laughs] We don’t know what Craig’s plans are. He has been playing with dynamics, even in that first episode of the season where we see Abby taking charge and being a leader.

She sure looks like she’s a leader in the finale’s last scene.

That scene plays at the idea that Abby is sitting in her power. And whatever that means, I will keep to myself for now. People who have played the game will have a few guesses.

When you went to work on “Godzilla x Kong: Supernova” the day after the Abby/Joel episode aired, did people treat you a little differently? Maybe keep their distance a bit? Hide the golf clubs?

It was pretty wild to go to work that day. Everyone wanted to talk about it. And all they could really get out was, “Oooooof, that episode.”

One thing I kept looking for all season was where they used CGI to remove a spider bite from your face. I couldn’t find it.

[Laughs] It’s in the first episode with the Fireflies. I had gone home for a few weeks and got a spider bite on my cheek. I thought it was a pimple. It was not a pimple. It was a huge spider bite and … I hate to use this word, but it was oozing. And the CGI is amazing. You can’t even tell it is there. I still have a scar on my face because they had to cut it out.

So, to summarize: a very eventful shoot for you.

For many reasons. I’ll never forget it.

Esai Morales is on a death-defying mission to make Tom Cruise’s life impossible, yet again, in the latest installment of the “Mission: Impossible” action film franchise. Titled “The Final Reckoning,” the movie was released Friday.

Morales reprises his role as Gabriel, an assassin liaison set on carrying out a dangerous mission for Entity, an artificial intelligence system gone rogue, whose capabilities render it a danger to human society. This role dates back to the first “Mission: Impossible” film in 1996, as a murder Gabriel committed was the impetus for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to join the Impossible Missions Force.

“I have to look at Gabriel as the star of his own movie,” said Morales in a video call. “I play these characters with as much humanity as I can.”

Although for most of the franchise Gabriel is presumably dead, audiences are introduced to Morales’ character in the 2023 summer flick, “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.” Besides shouldering responsibility as the main antagonist, which involves risky stunts opposite veteran adventurer Cruise, Morales also made franchise history as the first Latino lead in the action series.

The Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican actor is best known for his role as Bob Morales in the 1987 Chicano film “La Bamba” and as Jesus “Chucho” Sánchez in 1995’s “Mi Familia” — both of which been added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Morales is also known for his roles as Joseph Adama in the “Battlestar Galactica” prequel spin-off of “Caprica,” as well as Camino del Rio in Netflix’s “Ozark” and villain Deathstroke in the DC “Titans” series.

“The thing I love about ‘Mission: Impossible,’ with Gabriel, is that you don’t know he’s Latino,” Morales said. “It doesn’t focus on race. It focuses on the race to get the key!”  

Likewise, the release of the last two “Mission: Impossible” films was a dash to the finish. Directed by Christopher McQuarriel, filming spanned five years with some stops along the way due to the COVID-19 pandemic, plus the 2023 strikes by members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America. Additional costs due to inflation brought the total budget of the Paramount Pictures movie up to $400 million, making it one of the most expensive films of all time.

Morales considers its release a momentous occasion — and a “graduation” of sorts.

“All those obstacles are like the pressure that creates a diamond out of coal,” he said. “I hope that the audiences feel what I felt and continue to feel when I watch the film.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and shortened.

 How did you prepare physically and mentally for the role in ”Mission: Impossible”?
I was asked if I was physical and I said, “Actually, yeah.” I love playing tennis so my conditioning is really good. During the pandemic, I [would sneak] into the ocean at dusk and I would swim at night for hours at a time. It was kind of scary. Then [I got] to London and met some of the finest stunt people who do fighting, acrobatics, knife fighting, boxing. The thing is to get your reflexes in shape, because sometimes you have to do take after take and you don’t want to gas out.

Mentally it’s a lifetime of preparation. It’s not like I can study the life of Gabriel, so you apply what you can about your own character and characteristics under imaginary circumstances. Some of it comes from the ether… from the ether going after Ethan [laughs]. It’s an instinct and a lifetime of seeing movies, including the “Mission: Impossible” movies. They work hard. One of the most comforting things they instill is [that] “we’re not gonna leave until we get it right.”

Cruise is known for his gutsy live-action scenes. What was it like to join him on these scenes?
It’s thrilling. I couldn’t think of anyone else whose hands I’d want to put my well-being in, because look at his track record: He’s still alive and extremely healthy, and he doesn’t take these things lightly. He’s extremely strict about safety. Life is inherently risky. If you’re gonna take other risks, it’s best to take them with people that have survived and thrived for decades doing the same.

There’s a death-defying scene up in the air that was being teased a lot in this press run. What was going through your mind as you were up there?
After the initial prayers and thanking God, the universe and the angels, who and whatever has kept me alive and blessed me with an amazing life so far… You’ve gotta let go and let God, as they say.

What impact has this franchise had on your long-term career?
 It’s a blessing. I got the job during one of the most trying times of my life — and everyone else’s. I hope it’s not all downhill from here. I’m just grateful because I got to work on something at this scale, with these kinds of collaborators.

I am hoping that the work I continue to do leads to meaningful roles and characters that enhance the human condition for having watched it. I wanna do things that make people feel good about being human. Even if I’m the bad guy, somebody’s gotta play the bad guy. Right?

But is Gabriel really the bad guy?
Not in this actor’s eyes. For me, I have to look at Gabriel as the star of his own movie.  Wars are not fought by people who feel they’re gonna lose them.  So I play these characters with as much humanity as I can.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic and Hollywood strikes impact production of this film?
I am on the board of SAG-AFTRA. I did feel the impact of both COVID-19 and the strikes. I mean, it was not easy, it was not fun. It’s still not easy. We still have to deal with new media or new technology, speaking of AI. The production stuck together. When you struggle with adversity, it makes you stronger.

You consider yourself an honorary Chicano, particularly because of your role as Bob Morales in “La Bamba.” What memories come to mind when you think back to that role?
 So many, but the incredible irony or synchronicity or synergy that a role with my [last] name on it would be one of the most remembered. They’d say, ‘That has your name all over it.’ Well, this [role] literally did. When people wanted me to focus more on Ritchie, I wanted to bear witness and lend my pain to the role of Bob [Ritchie Valens’ brother].

I don’t know where my career would be without that film and a few others. When you have the ability to be with the person you are portraying, first of all, it’s an extreme amount of pressure because they’re there and you’re not them. And it’s like you’re gonna pretend to inhabit their being and their life. You don’t wanna mess up. But [Bob and I] were able to bond and have a few beers and really kick back, and I was able to absorb Bob’s biorhythm. I absorbed his Mexicanismo, [the same way] Anthony Quinn portrayed “Zorba the Greek.” [Whenever] he went [into] a Greek restaurant, plates would crash in honor of him and his portrayal … and he is a Mexican Irish actor.

 I think a lot of people forget that you’re Puerto Rican because you play the Mexican role so well.
I’m proud to be Puerto Rican, but I’m so secure in it that I don’t feel like I have to wear my banner on my head. I just want my work to speak for itself. We have to embrace that which has toughened us and has given us character and has given us something a little extra yearn for and live for.

There are many Latinos in sci-fi films. I’m thinking of you in “Caprica.” There’s also Diego Luna and Adria Arjona in “Andor,” Zoe Saldaña in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Pedro Pascal in “The Mandalorian,” Ricardo Montalbán in “Star Trek …” What do you think of space roles introducing Latino actors to new audiences?
 How about to their own audience? We make up 25% of the movie-going audience, at least. It’s a wise decision to include people that in the past were overlooked. We were overlooked. So to put in all the great people is serving your market and representing them. It’s long overdue but extremely welcomed.

Is outer space the gateway to more Latinos in mainstream roles in rom-coms or action?
I would like to see that. I would like to see us play more central characters, people that we can grow to learn, grow to love and feel for, because I think that’s what movies do. They let you inside the heart of your lead characters. And you just can’t help but to love them, you know?

If you are only going to be in one part of a movie, it’s best if it’s the most memorable part. For example, a thrilling set-piece that sets the template for an entire franchise.

So it was for actor Rolf Saxon, who appeared as a befuddled CIA analyst in the very first “Mission: Impossible” film. The sequence, in which Tom Cruise dangles from the ceiling of a stark white vault room to infiltrate the computer system overseen by Saxon’s character, is now the stuff of action-cinema history.

From a throwaway punchline in that 1996 film — exiling Saxon’s William Donloe to a remote radar station in Alaska — comes one of the most unexpected storylines in the new “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” His part in the new film is substantially larger and provides the film with some of its emotional heft, making Saxon’s return as Donloe a triumph. (A rather memorable knife makes a comeback as well.)

For Saxon’s work in the first film, he was in the same physical space as Cruise but their two characters never interacted and had no dialogue together. So a moment late in the new film when Donloe makes a heartfelt expression to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt of what his life has been like all these years in Alaska provided relief for the character of Donloe — and for the actor portraying him too.

“It was something I was hoping for, and then it happened,” says Saxon, 70. “It’s a great scene. Working with one of the biggest movie stars in the world, that’s kind of cool too.”

Rolf Saxon in the first ‘Mission: Impossible’ from 1996.

(Paramount Pictures)

Finally sharing a proper scene with Cruise also gave Saxon some insight into the reason Cruise has been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for more than 40 years.

“There’s no question why he is,” Saxon says. “The energy that he personally brings into a room, I’ve never witnessed before. It’s focused, it’s practiced. I know this sounds like I’m supposed to say this about him, but it’s true. This guy’s unbelievable. And he does those effing stunts.”

Saxon is impressed, too, by the real-life mission Cruise is often vocal about. “His whole raison d’être is to enhance the industry that’s given him so much and bring people in, bring them back to theaters. And I just applaud that on my feet.”

Rolf Saxon as William Donloe in the movie “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

(Giles Keyte / Paramount Pictures)

Having had a steadily successful career between his two “Missions,” Saxon lives in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California but was recently on a Zoom call from New York City the day after attending the new film’s U.S. premiere there. It was Saxon’s second time seeing the movie, having also attended a premiere in London just a few days earlier.

Born in Virginia, Saxon studied acting in England, where he would land parts in numerous British TV series as well as assorted film and theater roles. Throughout his career he has also done voice-over work for video games, including the “Broken Sword” series, and was the narrator for the American edition of the popular children’s show “Teletubbies.”

According to Saxon, much of the business of what Donloe does onscreen in the first movie directed by Brian De Palma came from an unexpected interaction on set.

“I was given the script,” he recalls, “I read it and I thought, OK, there’s not a lot to do here. And then one day I was messing around on set, joking around, there was some downtime. And I got a tap on the shoulder from the first [A.D.], who said that Brian De Palma wanted to have a word with me. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’

“And I walked over and he had a very stern demeanor. Great guy, but he just always looked angry and he said, ‘You’re playing around on set.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr. De Palma.’ He said, ‘Could you do that again?’ I said, “Sure, of course.” What am I going to say to say, no? He said, ‘OK, after lunch, we’re going to have you messing around onstage. We’ll film that.’” All of Donloe’s memorable physical mishaps — the vomiting, the double take — were Saxon improvs.

The vault sequence has become one of the signature set-pieces of the first film, seemingly lifting from both the silent heist in “Rififi” and the spacewalk of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and setting a stunts-centric guide for the franchise to come. To perform the scene, Cruise spent hours in a harness suspended from the ceiling.

“I mean, it was a long time,” says Saxon. “And they’d bring him down sometimes, but he’s that guy. He does what needs to be done. I was in the room a number of times with him, while he was filming it, but [our characters] never were supposed to meet.”

Saxon recalls that while shooting the first “Mission” film, he and Cruise shared a makeup room at the studio in England. One day the woman who did Cruise’s makeup wasn’t there because her son had an accident at his school. As soon as Cruise heard the news, he called his private on-call doctor and sent him to attend to the boy.

“And he hung up the phone, said, ‘Shut the door,’” remembers Saxon. “And he said, ‘This stays between us. If this comes out, it’s somebody in this room. I’m going to find out who it is and that’ll be your last day on the film.’ He wanted no publicity. He did it for this lady and her son. And the boy was fine, he was mildly concussed. When she came back the next day, there was a massive bouquet of flowers, saying ‘Welcome back.’ And then nothing was ever said of it again. That’s the kind of guy he is. And it took me two years before I would tell that story.”

Saxon had never had reason to encounter Cruise in the intervening years, because, as he says, “I’m an actor but I’m not a star.”

Director Christopher McQuarrie, standing, gives notes to the cast, including Saxon, on the set of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

(Antonio Olmos / Paramount Pictures)

The call for the new film first came in January of 2022, and Saxon began shooting on the film in August of that year, finishing in July of 2024. (Saxon’s casting was announced via director Christopher McQuarrie’s Instagram in March 2023.) This time around, Donloe becomes a vital part of the team and is in the middle of the action at the film’s climax. In his years in Alaska he has even married an Inuit woman, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk).

“The feeling on this set was one of warmth and inclusivity — welcoming,” says Saxon. “I was on it for almost three years, but people were on it for over five years. This schedule for the filming was very erratic, and [McQuarrie] kept very calm. McQ and Tom, they worked very much in tandem. I loved coming to work every day. Not that I didn’t with Brian’s stuff, but this was just a joy, and I was much more a part of it than I was in the first one. I was much more part of the team, the core group that was working.”

For “The Final Reckoning,” a sequence meant to take place in Alaska, with a team of agents arriving to the remote cabin occupied by Donloe and Tapeesa, was actually shot in Svalbard, an archipelago north of Norway.

“We were staying on a ship,” says Saxon. “We went to Longyearbyen, which is the furthest most populated area in the world. Then we took a six-hour ride north on the ship, parked on the glacier. And that’s where we lived for two weeks. Polar bears, walruses, reindeer and us. It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life.”

The cave sequence that is part of the movie’s action finale is set in South Africa but was shot in the Middleton mines in England’s East Midlands.

“This was in many ways a dream job,” says Saxon. “The people I’m working with, the thing I’m working on and the places I got to go to work. It’s just like, what would you really like to do? Here it is.”

Hayley Atwell, left, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Greg Tarzan Davis and Pom Klementieff in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

(Paramount Pictures)

From his initial conversations with McQuarrie, Saxon knew that his part would be significantly larger than in the first film. But even then it developed over the course of production. McQuarrie informed him that some scenes Saxon initially shot were no longer going to be used and due to rewrites, the actor would now be part of the climactic finale.

“He said, ‘We really like what you did, but we’ve had a story alteration, so we can’t use that. So we’re going to put you in in other ways,’” says Saxon. “And that was kind of like, ‘Oh, no’ and ‘Oh, yeah’ at the same time. Which is kind of the way this worked the whole way through.”

Among the actors in his scenes this time out, Saxon had previously worked with Simon Pegg on the 1999 British sitcom “Hippies.” He also discovered that he and Hayley Atwell had attended the same drama school in London, though some years apart. Also returning was Henry Czerny, whose character in the initial film sent Donloe to Alaska in the first place.

NEW YORK — MAY 19 2025: Actor Rolf Saxon for the movie “Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning” posing with the knife from the original Mission: Impossible film, photographed at the Museum of Moving Image

(Justin Jun Lee/For The Times)

As to whether he had ever imagined returning to the franchise, Saxon holds his arms out wide, saying, “Just a little dream.”

He adds, “I thought about writing Chris or Tom, ‘Dear Tom, here’s what I think we could do with Donloe.’ Or, ‘What about this with Donloe?’ And at one point, after listening to a friend, I drafted a letter to him. The next day I woke up and I thought” — he mimes wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it away — ‘That’s never going to happen.’ And then years later, bang, it did.”

Saxon said he has never been recognized by anyone for the part of Donloe. (That is likely about to change.) If pressed, his favorite of the “Mission: Impossible” films has remained the first one. Up to now.

“I suppose closure is one way of putting it,” says Saxon. “It’s been much more fun, this one. The other one, I did my job and I enjoyed doing it. But this one I got to really investigate. It’s like remounting a production onstage, or coming back to a project you did 20 years ago, 30 years ago and getting to redo it with what you know now, particularly with the excitement of a larger part. It’s fantastic. It’s another reason this is such a gift.”

Rather than stew over whether Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson should be admitted, the Baseball Hall of Fame should open a special wing for miscreants. Rose, the Black Sox members who are HOF-worthy, and PED users like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, whose accomplishments before they started using would have earned them plaques, would all be welcome.

Brian Lipson
Beverly Hills

So MLB has reinstated Pete Rose, months after his death. What a major league error to Pete Rose and his family, the fans and the Hall of Fame.

I understand that he violated the rules and bet while a player/manager, but his numbers, which make him a Hall of Famer, had nothing to do with bets. He didn’t cheat, he violated a rule. The Astros cheated and still kept the World Series title.

Russell Morgan
Carson

On the field a great player and fun to watch. Off the field bad news. His character a complete disaster. I hope he does not get in the Hall of Fame.

Phil Schneider
Marina del Rey

Was that a bit of ironic humor from Bill Shaikin saying he checked with bookies to see what the odds are on Pete Rose getting into the Hall of Fame?

Sports betting is now at epidemic levels and appears in various commercials and program commentary throughout sports media as a display of odds changing throughout many games. It’s so out of control that it’s become normalized.

As for Rose, he brazenly and obsessively bet on baseball, including games involving his own team when he was a manager. That has always been considered a cardinal sin in the sport. He lied about it for decades, then came clean half-heartedly to make money on a book, then tried to play the aggrieved victim being denied his rightful place in the Hall. It was a nauseating spectacle that went on for years.

Rose was an exceptional player. But character and certain violations matter, otherwise there’s no point in trying to protect the integrity of the game.

T.R. Jahns
Hemet

I understand the steroid thing with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, and maybe they too will be honored in the Hall of Fame someday, but this “integrity, sportsmanship and character” purity test is nonsense! Look at Ty Cobb! What matters is what happened on the field. Let the all-time hits leader in ASAP.

Kennedy Gammage
San Diego

Looking back, casting Diego Luna in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” may well prove to be the single most consequential decision in that storied franchise’s history. Hearing Luna’s Mexican accent in a galaxy far, far away was not only refreshing. It was radical.

And as Season 2 of “Andor” proved, it set the stage for what has to be the most Latino-coded of all the “Star Wars” tales, which is fitting considering this Tony Gilroy-created series was designed not just to explore Cassian Andor’s backstory but flesh out the dashing revolutionary spirit Luna had brought to the character. What better place to, pardon the pun, mine for inspiration than the vast history of resistance and revolution throughout the American continent?

Here are a few ways in which “Andor” felt particularly Latino.

Warning: this article contains some spoilers.

Undocumented laborers

Season 2 of “Andor” found Cassian, Bix (Adria Arjona), Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) and Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier) relocated to the agricultural planet of Mina-Rau. It’s a place that served as a safe haven for these Ferrix folks, allowing them to be housed while working for a local farmer — all without papers. Yes, our very own Cassian is an undocumented laborer (when he’s not, you know, on some super-secret Luthen-guided mission, that is).

“Andor” has always focused on the way the Empire functions at a granular level, while the “Star Wars” feature film trilogies are all about big-picture stuff. In its two-season run, this Luna-fronted project followed the day-to-day lives of those living under the thumb of the Empire. And in the scenes at Mina-Rau, the show insisted on showing what happens when those with a semblance of power (a uniform, a weapon) confront those who they think have none.

When Lt. Krole (Alex Waldmann), a lowly Imperial officer carrying out a run-of-the-mill audit of the crops in Mina-Rau, comes across Bix, he sees an opportunity. She’s clearly alone. And, perhaps most obviously, at a disadvantage: She has no papers. If she’s caught, the secure, if precarious, life she and Cassian have built in Mina-Rau will come crumbling down — all while putting them at risk of being revealed as smugglers and rebels.

Still, watching Krole escalate his slimy sexual advances into a rape attempt was a reminder of the impunity of such crimes. When those who are undocumented are seen as undeserving of our empathy, let alone the protections the law is supposed to provide — like many people in our current government seem to think — the likes of Krole are emboldened to do as they please.

Hiding in plain sight and los desaparecidos

Such ideas about who merits our empathy are key to authoritarian regimes. Borders, after all, aren’t just about keeping people out or in. It’s about drawing up communities and outlining outsiders; about arguing for a strict sense of who belongs and who does not.

When Cassian and Bix land in Coruscant after their escape from Mina-Rau, they struggle with whether to just lay low. You see Cassian being jumpy and constantly paranoid. He can’t even handle going out shopping; or, if you follow Bix’s winking joke at the grocer, he can’t really handle the spice. But that’s expected if you constantly feel unsafe, unable to freely move through the world, er, galaxy.
More tellingly: If your existence is wedded to bureaucracy, it’s easy to be dispensed with and disappeared. Bix knows that all too well. She’s still haunted by the specter of Dr. Gorst (Joshua James), the Imperial Security Bureau officer who tortured her. He appears in her nightmares to remind her that this is a war now littered with “desaparecidos”: “His body won’t be found and his family won’t know what happened to him,” his hallucination taunts her. It’s not hard to read in that line an obvious reference to those tortured and disappeared under the military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the like.

Throughout “Andor” Season 2, we also watched the Empire slowly rev up its border policing — especially when it came to Ghorman. At first a planet most known for its gorgeous textiles, Ghorman later became the anchor for the show’s entire narrative. The best way to control a people is to surveil them, particularly because soon enough they’ll start surveilling themselves.

The Ghorman Massacre

The beauty of “Star Wars” has always been its ability to speak to its time. When the original film first premiered in 1977, echoes of the Vietnam War and anti-imperialist sentiment could be felt in its otherwise outlandish space-opera trappings. But not until “Andor” could the politics of George Lucas’ creation be so viscerally felt. This is a show, after all, that didn’t shy away from using the word “genocide” when rightly describing what happened in Ghorman.

In “Who Are You?” audiences got to see the Empire at its cruelest. Watching the Death Star destroy Alderaan from afar is one thing. But getting to watch Stormtroopers — and a slew of young, inexperienced Imperial riot police officers — shooting indiscriminately into a crowd that had just been peacefully singing in protest was brutal. It was, as Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) would later frame it, unconscionable.

The chants in the crowd “The galaxy is watching” are clearly meant to evoke the chants heard at the 1968 Democratic National Convention: “The whole world is watching.” But the essence of the massacre harks back to another infamous 1968 event: the Tlatelolco massacre.

Just like Ghorman, the Oct. 2 student protests at Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas began as a peaceful demonstration. But soon, with helicopters up above and an encroaching military presence from every which way, chaos followed and the incident has long served as a chilling example of state-sanctioned violence. The kind now best distilled into a fictional massacre in a galaxy far, far away.

Villa, Zapata, Andor

In the hands of Gilroy and Luna, “Andor” billed itself over two seasons as the begrudging rise of a revolutionary. Cassian spent much of Season 1 trying to hide from who he could become. It took being sent to a grueling slave prison complex in a remote location (sound familiar?) to further radicalize the once-smug smuggler.

But with every new Empire-sanctioned atrocity, he found himself unable to escape his calling as a member of the Resistance. Yes, it costs him his peaceful life with Bix, but neither would have it any other way. Cassian has a solid moral compass. And while he may not play well with others (with authority, really), he’s a charming leader of sorts whose childhood in Ferrix set him up to be the kind of man who would sacrifice his life for a cause.

You don’t need to have Luna sport a mustache, though, to see in his rascal of a character hints of revolutionary icons from Latin America. Even if Cassian is more Emiliano Zapata than Pancho Villa (you’d never find him starring in films as himself, for instance), the revolutionary spirit of those historical Mexican figures is undeniable. Especially since Cassian has long been tied to the marginalized — not just in Ferrix and Mina-Rau but later still in Ghorman.

Add the fact that his backstory grounds him in the indigenous world of Kenari and that he is quite at home in the lush jungles of Yavin IV (where he may as well be playing dominoes in his spare time) and you have a character who clearly carves out homages to resistance models seen all over Latin America.

As attacks on those most disenfranchised here in the United States continue apace, “Andor” (yes, a spinoff sci-fi series on Disney+!) reminds us that the Latin American struggles for liberation in the 20th century aren’t mere historical stories. They’re warnings and templates as to how to confront this moment.

And yes, that message obviously works best when delivered by the devilishly handsome Luna: “The Empire cannot win,” as his Cassian says in the first episode of the show’s stellar second season. “You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.”

After humans, and arguably before dogs and horses, there is no character more vital to the screen, and more vital onscreen, than the automobile.

Driven or driverless, the car is the most animated of inanimate objects, sometimes literally a cartoon, with a voice, a personality, a name. Even when not speaking, they purr, they roar. They are stars in their own right — the Batmobile, the Munster Koach, James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, K.I.T.T. (the modified 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from “Knight Rider”), the Ford Grand Torino (nicknamed the Striped Tomato) driven by Starsky and Hutch. They might represent freedom, power, delinquency or even the devil. Whole movies have been built about them and the amazing things they can do, but even when they aren’t jumping and flipping and crashing, they play an essential role in helping flesh-and-blood characters take care of business.

Perhaps in some sort of reaction to our enlightened view of the effects of our gas-guzzling ways, two new series fetishizing the internal combustion engine arrive, Max’s “Duster,” now streaming, and Prime Video’s “Motorheads,” premiering Tuesday.

Created by J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan and named for the supernaturally shiny cherry-red Plymouth the hero drives, “Duster” is stupid fun, a comic melodrama steeped in 1970s exploitation flicks, with a lot of loving homage to period clothes, knickknacks and interior design. The driver is Jim Ellis, played by Josh Holloway, in what reads like a turn on Sawyer, his charming, criminal character from Abrams’ “Lost,” topped with a shot of Matthew McConaughey.

Jim, a man who has never bothered to make a three-point turn, works out of Phoenix for Southwest crime boss Ezra Saxton (Keith David, monumental as always), picking up this, delivering that. The first delivery we see turns out to be a human heart, picked up from a fast-food drive-through window, destined for Saxton’s ailing son, Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson). Along for the ride is little Luna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), who calls Jim “uncle,” though you are free to speculate; her mother, Izzy (Camille Guaty), is a big-rig trucker — trucking being another fun feature of ’70s pop culture — who will find cause to become a labor leader.

Keith David, left, as Ezra Saxton and Benjamin Charles Watson as his son, Royce.

(Ursula Coyote / Max)

The Ellises and the Saxtons, also including daughter Genesis (Sydney Elisabeth), have history — Jim’s father, Wade (Corbin Bernson), served with Ezra in World War II, and his late lamented brother had worked for him as well. Saxton is the sort of bad guy with whom you somehow sympathize in spite of the violence he employs; there’s genuine affection among the families, though one is never sure when or where a line will be drawn, only that one probably will be.

Into Jim’s low-rent but relatively settled, even happy world comes FBI agent Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson, sparky), fresh out of Quantico and ambitious to make a mark. As a Black woman, she’s told, “No one’s clamoring for an agent like you,” but she’s been assigned to Phoenix “because we have no other options.” She’s partnered there with cheerful Navajo agent Awan (Asivak Koostachin), as if to corral the minorities into a manageable corner, and assigned the Saxton case, regarded as “cursed” and so intractable as to be not worth touching.

Which is to say, agents deemed not worth taking seriously — along with underestimated “girl Friday” Jessica (Sofia Vassilieva) — have been thrown a case deemed not worth taking seriously. This is a classic premise for a procedural and strikes some notes about racism and sexism in the bargain, not out of tune with the times in which it’s set, or the times in which we’re watching.

Nina, who has managed to gather evidence of Jim crossing state lines to deliver the heart, which was stolen, and that Saxton may have been responsible for his brother’s death, bullies and tempts him into becoming a confidential informant. Thus begins an uneasy partnership, though their storylines run largely on separate tracks in separate scenes.

“Lost” was not a show that bothered much with sense in order to achieve its effects, and “Duster,” though it involves a far-reaching conspiracy whose payoff plays like the end of a shaggy-dog story, is a show of effects, of set pieces and sequences, of car chases and fistfights, of left-field notions and characters. These include Patrick Warburton as an Elvis-obsessed mobster named Sunglasses; Donal Logue as a corrupt, perverse, evangelical policeman; Gail O’Grady as Jim’s stepmother, a former showgirl who doesn’t much like him; LSD experiments; absurd puzzles (also see: “Lost”); an airheaded version of Adrienne Barbeau (Mikaela Hoover), with the actual Barbeau, a queen of genre films, making an appearance; Richard Nixon (in a few creepy seconds of AI); an oddly jolly Howard Hughes (Tom Nelis) in his Kleenex-box slippers; and a “Roadrunner” pastiche. Though not devoid of genuine feeling, it’s best experienced as a collection of attitudes and energies, noises and colors. Don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself.

The opening titles are super cool.

Zac (Michael Cimino), left, Caitlyn (Melissa Collazo) and Marcel (Nicolas Cantu) in Prime Video’s “Motoheads.”

(Keri Anderson / Prime Video)

“Motorheads” is a familiar sort of modern teenage soap opera but with cars. For reasons known only to series creator John A. Norris, the whole town is obsessed with them, and along with its human storylines, the series is a tour of automotive entertainments — drag racing, street racing, ATV racing, go-kart racing, classic car collecting. I have no idea whether this will resonate with the target demographic, but there is much I cannot tell you about kids these days.

As is common to the form, our young protagonists — Michael Cimino as Zac and Melissa Collazo as Caitlyn — are new to town, having been brought back from New York City by their mother, Samantha (Nathalie Kelly), to the oxymoronically named Rust Belt hamlet of Ironwood, where she was raised, and which is the last place anyone saw their father, Christian (Deacon Phillippe in flashbacks), 17 years earlier. He’s an infamous local legend, admired for his skill behind the wheel; aerial footage of Christian threading his way through a cordon of police cars as the getaway driver in a robbery keeps making its way into the show, though if you live in Los Angeles, you see this sort of thing on the news all the time. Marquee name Ryan Phillippe plays the kids’ Uncle Logan, who runs a garage that apparently does no business, but he has love and wisdom to spare.

Though at the center of the series, Zac’s storyline is a little shopworn, not just his wish to become, almost out of nowhere, Ironwood’s top speed racer, but his textbook interest in rich girl Alicia (Mia Healey), the girlfriend of rich boy Harris (Josh Macqueen), a Porsche-driving bully who is also hurting inside — so feel free to get a crush on him, if that’s your type. More interesting is sister Caitlyn, who prefers building cars to racing them and is perhaps the series’ most emotionally balanced character.

She becomes friends with shop classmate Curtis (Uriah Shelton), tall and good-looking, whose criminally inclined older brother, Ray (Drake Rodger), will become a sort of dark mentor to Zac. With the addition of Marcel (Nicolas Cantu), the archetypal “geek who becomes the hero’s best friend,” who works at the diner his father (grieving, drunk) used to own and dreams of designing cars, the four constitute the show’s outsider band of good guys.

They’ll have their not-always-happy business with each other — being teenagers, you know, things happen — and with their elders, as their elders will with one another. The past is not past in Ironwood; old feelings will resurface and old plots unravel. (And no one knows what happened to Christian.) Except for the cars sprinkled on top, it’s old stuff, not very deep, but produced with an engaging naturalism that rounds off the narrative extremes, enhances what’s commonplace and makes “Motorheads” easy to watch. (Colin Hoult is the sensitive director of photography, it’s worth mentioning.)

Drive on.

On the most basic level, “Stick” is about a prematurely washed-up golfer who takes a teen prodigy under his wing and on the road. Off they go in an RV to hit some big amateur tournaments, accompanied by the kid’s mother and the old pro’s irascible buddy. The kid gets to fall in love with a free-spirited lass. Adventures are had. Lessons are learned.

But very little about golf takes place on a basic level (except maybe in “Caddyshack”). The sport is rife with metaphors. Lay up or go for broke? (see also, “Tin Cup.”) Keep your cool under pressure or lose it in the sand trap? So it makes sense that “Stick,” premiering June 4 on Apple TV+, uses the game of golf to take a swing at the game of life.

The wash-up, Pryce Cahill (played by Owen Wilson), seeks redemption. Years back, he flipped out on the course, and his life has been in free fall since — he and his wife (Judy Greer) are getting a divorce, and their home is being sold. But then he meets the 17-year-old prodigy, Santi (newcomer Peter Dager), who he sees as the key to a second chance. Santi, meanwhile, knows he’s good; when he pummels a ball, it sounds like a sonic boom. But his first coach was his hard-ass, now-vanished dad, and Santi now has trouble taking golf seriously or respecting his elders.

These human elements intrigued series creator Jason Keller far more than anything that might happen on the links. “I love golf, but I’m not good at it,” he said. “I am routinely frustrated by it.”

Owen Wilson, left, Judy Greer and Peter Dager in a scene from “Stick.”

(Apple)

Frustration, of course, is a universal quality. So is disappointment. These are the elements that pushed Keller, who wrote the screenplay for the 2019 movie “Ford v Ferrari,” to create “Stick.”

“Long before the story was set on a golf course, I was really interested in exploring a character who had not lived up to expectations,” he said. “I was interested in characters that had great promise but ultimately didn’t achieve that promise. What happens to somebody afterward? How do they react to that? Do they let themselves be defined by not achieving that level, or do they try to reconcile that? Does it motivate them to excel in other areas of their life?”

Wilson, who also readily admits his golf game isn’t the strongest — “My dad and my brothers played, but I was always intimidated by it” — sees another key parallel to life: As much as you seek perfection, you can never achieve it.

“There’s a little bit of a chess thing with golf, in that you can never really master it,” he said. “That can feel like life too. People talk about Tiger Woods winning the Masters by like 12 strokes and deciding his swing isn’t quite right. Pryce talks about how the game takes and takes and takes. I think people feel that way about life as well.”

Mariana Treviño, the Mexican actor who plays Santi’s mom, Elena, agrees that “Stick” is about dealing with hardships. “Elena is in a moment in her life where she had a big disappointment,” she said. “Her family broke down. Sometimes in life when something very strong happens to you, you just kind of shut out from the world. You think that you’re going to protect that wound by just not moving too much from a place, or not directly confronting something that is painful.”

“Long before the story was set on a golf course, I was really interested in exploring a character who had not lived up to expectations,” said “Stick” creator Jason Keller.

(Matt Seidel / For The Times)

If this all sounds a tad serious, “Stick” really isn’t. As with most anything starring Wilson, whose Texas/California cool works just fine in the series’ Indiana setting (Keller hails from Indianapolis), “Stick” feels easy and breezy even when it gets into heavy-ish themes. The tone suggests a riff on “Ted Lasso” but with golf instead of soccer.

Wilson and Marc Maron, who plays Pryce’s grumpy, long-suffering best bud (who is dealing with grief of his own), keep up the steady banter of two guys who know each other’s foibles and try to resist the urge to poke them. Zero, Santi’s new friend and life guru played by Lilli Kay, is a self-described “genderqueer, anticapitalist, postcolonial feminist,” and the series manages to have fun with her without making fun of her.

Elena, meanwhile, is mildly suspicious of the whole endeavor, but she finds the aging white golfers amusing. She also likes the cash Pryce has thrown her way for the privilege of coaching her son.

Put them all together in an RV, and on a series of golf courses, and you’ve got the makings of a modern family comedy. Except most of the “family” aren’t related.

“They’re a sort of a found family, and they are all very different personalities,” Keller said. “But ultimately they are what each other needed, and none of them knew it. I think that’s the beauty and the fun and the heart of the show. We’re watching a group of people that don’t fit together at first, and then they realize they needed each other. I hope that warmth and the feel-good element of that is felt by audiences.”

“They’re a sort of a found family, and they are all very different personalities,” said Jason Keller about the characters. “But ultimately they are what each other needed, and none of them knew it.” Lilli Kay, left, Mariana Treviño, Judy Greer and Marc Maron in “Stick.”

(Apple)

But that sense of major disappointment, and the question of how to turn the page, still lingers over the story. Keller is intimately acquainted with that kind of challenge.

He was 25, newly arrived in Hollywood, when doctors discovered a benign brain tumor. It was successfully removed, but the subsequent nerve damage meant Keller had to retrain his brain to let him walk again. Now 56, he says he “didn’t realize what a gift that hard experience was. I became very grateful for being physically healthy.”

Keller used that sink-or-swim experience to write his “Stick” characters. “Everybody has a point in their life that just brought them to their knees,” he said. “It could be a divorce or the death of a loved one. We all face these personal tragedies or challenges. What do you do with them after you go through ’em and survive ’em? That’s the real question.”

Even Santi, the youngest character in “Stick,” has been burned by life. “He’s scared, and he has every reason to be,” Dager said. “His father left him.” And he responded by building a hard shell and walking with a swagger.

Dager embraced the whole package. “I fell in love with his past but also his soul and the way he protects himself with the humor he uses as a defense mechanism,” Dager said. “And then once we get to know him and he starts to fall in love and he starts to trust people, you really see the kid. You see who he actually wants to be.”

And if you do happen to be a golfer, if you know a birdie from an eagle, an iron from a wood, “Stick” doesn’t skimp on the sports stuff. It might even inspire you to go out to the garage and excavate that moldering set of clubs. Or not.

“The golfers I’ve shown it to have connected to it and appreciated it at the level of the sport,” Keller said. “And the others who have seen it who are not golfers seem to be responding to it at a purely emotional character level. I think they’re connecting to it. We’ll see if we got it right. I hope we did.”

In “Overcompensating,” Prime Video’s newly released comedy series, everyone is doing too much. That’s what Benito Skinner, the creator and star of the A24-produced show, experienced in college in the mid-2010s, and why it felt like a perfect backdrop to tell a heightened version of his own coming out story.

“Overcompensating” centers around Benny (played by Skinner), a closeted former high school football player turned college frat bro who spends too much energy posing as a straight guy by lowering his voice and keeping his love for Lorde’s songwriting in check. That’s the case even, or especially, when he’s greeted by “The Alliance of Gay People and Lesbians and Bisexual People and Asexuals too even” as he makes his way around campus.

But Skinner knew there was plenty of narrative potential in focusing on the thorny relationship Benny strikes up with Carmen, a girl who ends up being both his beard and his BFF. Only in this telling, Carmen, played by Wally Baram, isn’t just a supporting player in Benny’s path toward self-acceptance.

“Naturally that story and getting to college, it’s this coming of age thing,” Skinner says. “And for so many gay people, it’s meeting these girlfriends who are creating these safe spaces — all the while they have their own s— going on. What was so interesting to me is thinking how I’m going through this whole journey inside. But so is she. She is having this whole other experience too.”

Benny (Benito Skinner) and Carmen (Wally Baram) in “Overcompensating.”

(Sabrina Lantos / Prime Video)

Baram says when she read the show’s pilot episode, she instantly understood where the character was coming from.

“I got the script, and within the first three pages, there’s this character — this frizzy, curly haired girl who’s kind of awkward and just can’t do the same thing that everyone else is doing,” Baram recalls. “And who, over the course of the script, is overcompensating with love. That was just so me for a really large chunk of my life, frankly.”

After meeting at orientation — and bonding over the need to ignore the kid who insists on telling everyone he’s Amanda Knox’s cousin — Benny and Carmen fumble through a performed kind of meet-cute. Wishing to do away with his sexual urges for cute boys on campus and hoping to avoid becoming a campus pariah if he doesn’t sleep with a girl on his first day at school, Benny pursues Carmen.

Over the course of the eight-episode season of “Overcompensating,” their freshman situationship quickly gets more and more complicated. Carmen is clueless at first about why things aren’t clicking with Benny in the bedroom (or more like the dorm room). And the root of the issue can be difficult for her to discern.

“It’s like, how could you not know he was gay? But in these relationships I’ve had with women, there was so much confusion and miscommunication through sad dishonesty,” he says. “The Carmen character was so fun to write because this girl is experiencing this on the other side being like, ‘What the f— is wrong with this guy?’ I found that for women, gay was the last thing on their list of things why these relationships weren’t working. And I’m like, ‘No, babe, that’s No. 1.’ You did nothing wrong.”

Benito Skinner on writing the relationship between his character and Carmen: “I found that for women, gay was the last thing on their list of things why these relationships weren’t working. And I’m like, ‘No, babe, that’s No. 1.’ You did nothing wrong.”

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

Finding the right actress to nail Carmen’s charming awkwardness was a challenge. Like Benny, Carmen is trying to start anew and fit in at the fictional Yates University. She’s often pushing herself to perform whatever normalcy looks like for a college freshman.

Carmen doesn’t nail collegespeak — “Here’s to a night we’ll never remember with the friends we’ll never forgive,” she captions her first selfie with Benny — but she’s skilled at beer pong, first-person shooters and chugging drinks like the frat boys on campus. More importantly, she is sweet and attentive, the kind of tender girlfriend a closeted boy like Benny would naturally gravitate toward.

At the suggestion of A24 producer Alli Reich, Skinner watched Baram’s 2021 set on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” There, the young comedian, who’s Mexican and Syrian (“or as Fox News would call me, a ‘very lazy terrorist,’” she joked), poked fun at how she’s struggling with adulthood, especially since her body felt both childlike and grown-up at the same time. “I’m 5’2”, I have a baby face, but I’ve [got] boobs and the voice of like an eighth grade Jewish boy,” she deadpanned in the set.

“I had sat with this character for four and a half, five years,” Skinner recalls. “And I watched this video, and it was this very surreal moment. She was exactly what I had in my head for Carmen. I was like, ‘OK, well, it’s her.’”

Baram’s winsome self-deprecation felt like a perfect match for the cast of this off-kilter comedy Skinner was assembling.

“When we met in person, I felt like I had little maracas out,” Baram jokes. “The energy in that room was just like, ‘Oh, hello!’ Like when two dogs meet, and their tails go up.”

“It was so two chihuahuas meet, finally,” Skinner adds.

“When we met in person, I felt like I had little maracas out,” Wally Baram says about Benito Skinner.

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

“Overcompensating” hinges on their crackling chemistry. But as the season unfolds, the series becomes more and more of an ensemble piece. As Benny navigates his first semester at Yates, we spend more time with his sullen sister, Grace (Mary Beth Barone); her douchey frat boyfriend, Peter (Adam DiMarco); Benny’s swoon-worthy crush, Miles (Rish Shah) and Carmen’s brassy, sassy roommate Hailee (Holmes).

Together, they create a vision of college life that will make millennials cringe in recognition. The pilot, after all, opens with Britney Spears’ “Lucky” and the foundational queer film “George of the Jungle,” starring a chiseled, loin-clothed Brendan Fraser. But it’s the needle drops throughout the show that best capture that generation and moment in time. Charli XCX may get the spotlight treatment — she guest stars as herself in Episode 4 — but the deployment of a My Chemical Romance song in a later episode made the cast realize just how wounding and specific the writing on the show could be.

“I read ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ and it sent a chill down my spine because I thought that was private to me, alone in my room,” Baram says. “And then you put it in there and I was like, ‘OK, so we all had that moment,’ which is both good and also, wow, my plight is not special.”

“That is so true that it felt private to all of us,” Skinner adds. “Because that was also something with Mary Beth, too. When we were talking about that song, she’s like, ‘I feel this in my bones, maybe in a good and a really mortifying way.’ I hope it has a resurgence. I do think Gen Z will really enjoy that song. It feels very them.”

Barone’s cringey karaoke rendition of that emo 2006 banger resonates because it captures the joy (and embarrassment) that comes from being unabashedly oneself — something every character in “Overcompensating” grapples with to varying degrees of success.

“Overcompensating” hinges on the chemistry between Wally Baram and Benito Skinner.

(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)

Skinner’s comedy excels at capturing those crippling feelings of inadequacy — whether you’re a closeted dude rushing a frat, a secretly emo girl trying to please her boyfriend or a shy freshman figuring out who she could be away from home.

“Some of these people that come into college where they’re like, ‘I’m gonna do me no matter what, and I’m coming in here like a bat out of hell’ — I felt so in awe watching them,” Skinner says. “I was like, ‘This is so incredible that you can do this.’ Meanwhile I feel so confident in one room and in the next room I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I should not be here.’”

That’s precisely what Baram keyed into when bringing Carmen to life, as well as listening to “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo to get into character.

“Because it reminds me of a time in my life in which I thought I was conquering the social. I was going to a party, and I thought that I was gonna, you know, get down and dirty,” she says. “But really, I was a disingenuous version of myself, and ultimately ended up feeling unrewarded at the end, no matter what I did, whether I had a successful social interaction or I failed miserably.”

“Overcompensating” broadens concepts that are central to the queer experience — like the closet and found families — and places them at the heart of the modern college experience. And, in between jokes about pink eye, Grindr dates gone wrong and a pitch perfect takedown of college improv, the series makes a heartfelt case for how to make the best out of those formative years.

“To do it right, I think, is the Benny and Carmen way,” Skinner says. “It’s finding the person that doesn’t make you feel like you have to be so inconsistent with who you are and the things you actually want to do. For me it’s like, you’re bad at overcompensating when you’re with the right person.”