It’s awards season crunch time, in the sense that I’m crunching in as much work as I can before a Thanksgiving respite — including a guide to some of the highlights from this week’s issue of The Envelope, covered by my profile of Renate Reinsve.
Whether it’s while you smell turkey legs being turned into gravy (i.e., if you’re me as I write this) or as you’re lounging around over the holiday weekend, I hope you’ll dive into the great stories below. And be sure to take a breather from the mayhem in the process. It’s a marathon, not a sprint!
Digital Cover: Ethan Hawke
(Victoria Will / For The Times)
In the years since the Golden Age of TV, it’s not been uncommon for actors to vie for major awards on both the big and small screens at once. But few in recent memory have done so in such distinct projects as Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon” and “The Lowdown”: One is a chamber drama about the last days of legendary songwriter Lorenz Hart, the other a noirish tale of a hangdog journalist.
It’s a reflection of the actor’s voracious appetite for the unexpected (see also: “Black Phone 2”), which he reveals that some in Hollywood once found “irritating.”
“Generally, people are more comfortable when they know exactly what you are and what your thing is, and if you keep changing your thing it’s confusing,” he tells writer Emily Zemler. “But it’s always been interesting to me to do different things. It makes acting really exciting to me to keep shaking it up. Each thing has its own geometry and math, and that keeps you really engaged.”
Eva Victor on ‘Sorry, Baby’
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
One of my favorite films of the year, “Sorry, Baby” works on many levels — as a campus satire, a portrait of a friendship, a slice of small-town life. And as writer-director-star Eva Victor writes in a new essay on the film, it took all of those other levels to make the film’s deepest, darkest level possible.
“There was a time in my life when I was looking for a film about going through a trauma that held my hand while I was watching it,” Victor notes, contrasting “Sorry, Baby” with films that depict similar subjects with violent imagery. “I needed the film to care for me, the person who’d been through the difficult thing. I didn’t need a film that existed to teach people how bad it is to go through a bad thing, I needed a film that existed to make me feel less alone.”
How ‘F1’ became a part of F1
As an avowed fan of Formula One, from docuseries “Drive to Survive” to scripted miniseries “Senna,” what fascinated me most watching Apple TV’s summer blockbuster “F1” was the delicate logistical dance it must’ve required to shoot a major theatrical film at actual races on the actual F1 circuit. Maybe that’s my stressed-out editor brain at work, but I asked Nate Rogers to dig into the question.
He reports back that even with legendary racer Lewis Hamilton and Apple on board, the film had to prove “that they could set up at an event like the fabled British Grand Prix at Silverstone and not cause a pileup.”
“We had to rehearse the blocking and staging for about two weeks with a stopwatch … to prove to them that we could actually shoot a scene and get off the track before the race started,” director Joseph Kosinski tells Rogers.
NEW YORK — A tax on tea once sparked rebellion. This time, it’s just causing headaches.
Importers of the prized leaves have watched costs climb, orders stall and margins shrink under the weight of President Trump’s tariffs. Now, even after Trump has given them a reprieve, tea traders say it won’t immediately undo the damage.
“It took a while to work its way through the system, these tariffs, and it will take a while for it to work its way out of the system,” says Bruce Richardson, a celebrated tea master, tea historian and purveyor of teas at his shop, Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, in Danville, Ky. “That tariffed tea is still working its way out of our warehouses.”
While some bigger firms are behind the biggest supermarket brands, the premium tea market is largely the work of smaller businesses — family farms, specialty importers and a web of little tea shops, tea rooms and tea cafes across the U.S. Amid an onslaught of tariffs, they have become showcases for the levies’ effects.
On their shelves, selection has narrowed, with some teas missing because they’re no longer viable products to stock with the steep levies. In their warehouses, managers are consumed with uncertainty and operational headaches, including calculating what a blend really costs, with ingredients from multiple countries on a roller coaster of tariffs. And in backrooms where the wafting scent of fresh tea permeates, owners have been forced to put off job postings, raises, advertising and other investments so they can have cash available to pay duties when their containers arrive at U.S. ports.
“If I were to add up all the money I’ve spent on tariffs that weren’t there a year ago, it could equal a new employee,” says Hartley Johnson, who owns the Mark T. Wendell Tea Co. in Acton, Mass.
Johnson’s prices used to stay static for a year or longer. He ate the tariff costs before being forced to respond. His most popular tea, a smoky Taiwanese one called Hu-Kwa, has steadily risen from $26 to $46 a pound.
He knows some customers are reconsidering.
“Where is that tipping point?” Johnson asks. “I’m kind of finding that tipping point is happening now.”
That tipping point already came for one tea company in the City of Commerce.
International Tea Importers, already under financial strain from climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, said that tariffs were the final blow, creating an untenable cash flow crunch and forcing its closure after 35 years in business.
“We just became over-leveraged financing — not just the inventory, but also the tariffs,” says the company’s chief executive, Brendan Shah.
Despite the other financial challenges, if not for the tariffs, Shah says, it may have survived.
“Unpredictable tariff policies,” he wrote to customers in announcing the company’s closure, “have created the final, insurmountable barrier.”
Though Trump backed off some tariffs on agricultural products last week, many in the tea trade are wary of celebrating too soon and caution tea drinkers shouldn’t either. Much of next year’s supply has already been imported and tariffed, and the full impact of those duties may not have fully spilled downhill.
Meantime, other tariff-driven price hikes persist. All sorts of other products tea businesses import, such as teapots and infusers, remain subject to levies, and costs for some American-made items, like tins for packaging, have spiked because they rely on foreign materials.
“The canisters, the bamboo boxes, the matcha whisks, everything that we import, everything that we sell has been affected by tariffs,” says Gilbert Tsang, owner of MEM Tea Imports in Wakefield, Mass.
Though globally tea reigns supreme, imbibed more than anything but water, it has long been overshadowed by coffee in the U.S. Still, tea is entwined in American history from the very beginning, even before colonists angry with tariffs dumped tons of it in Boston Harbor.
Boston may run on Dunkin’ today, but it was born on tea.
The 1773 revolt that became known as the Boston Tea Party rose out of the British Parliament’s implementation of tea tariffs on colonists, who rejected taxation without representation in government. After an independent United States was born, one of the new government’s first major acts, the Tariff Act of 1789, ironically set in law import taxes on a range of products including tea. In time, though, trade policy came to include carve-outs for many products Americans rely on but don’t produce.
For more than 150 years, most tea has passed through U.S. ports with little to no duties.
That began to change in Trump’s first term with his hard-line approach to China. But nothing compared to what came with his return to the White House.
In July, the most recent month for which the U.S. International Trade Commission has tallied tariff numbers, tea was taxed at an average rate of over 12%, a huge increase from a year earlier when it was just under one-tenth of a percent. In that single month, American businesses and consumers paid more than $6 million in tea import taxes, amassing in just 31 days more tariffs than any previous full year on record.
“All over again, taxation without representation,” says Richardson, an advisor to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. “Our wants and needs and our voices are not being represented because Congress is avoiding the issue by simply allowing the president to act like George III.”
All told, tea importers paid about $19.6 million in tariffs in the first seven months of 2025, nearly seven times as much as the same period last year.
It’s all been confounding to those steeped in the world of tea, on which the U.S. depends on foreign countries for nearly all of the billions of pounds Americans brew each year. Though a number of small tea farms exist in the U.S., they can’t fill Americans’ cups for more than a few hours of the year.
Said Angela McDonald, president of the United States League of Tea Growers: “We don’t have an industry and we can’t produce one overnight.”
Clad in close-fitting black outfits, two performers get into stance for a fight scene. The cameras surrounding the massive stage in Playa Vista start rolling.
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One turns around slowly, pantomimes being shot, and carefully, deliberately, arches himself backward, clawing at the air before a stunt coordinator helps ease him toward a black mattress.
That movement is translated into dots and lines on a nearby computer, transmitted by the round, white sensors embedded in the suits’ colorful almond-shaped patches. Later, those will be fleshed out into characters and scenes in the new “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7” game, which debuts Friday.
It’s all part of the blockbuster production effort that goes into making one of the most popular video game franchises ever. “Call of Duty,” from Santa Monica publisher Activision, has ranked as the top-selling video game series in the U.S. for 16 straight years and has sold more than 500 million copies globally since the first installment was released in 2003.
And as one of the few franchises with an annual release schedule, hitting that deadline takes an army. About 3,000 people worked on “Black Ops 7” over the course of four years.
Activision executives declined to discuss the game’s budget but called it a “significant investment.” Top video game franchises can have production costs of $250 million or more — higher than most big-budget Hollywood films.
“It’s like, every year we have to launch a new ‘Star Wars.’ Every year we have to launch a new ‘Avatar,’ ” said Tyler Bahl, chief marketing officer at Activision. “So we have to think about, how do we do this in an unexpected way?”
“Ultimately, we want to treat our games like an absolute blockbuster,” said Matt Cox, general manager of “Call of Duty” at Activision, who has worked on the franchise for more than 10 years. “The investment is there for them.”
Activision’s Treyarch game production studio is where Call of Duty video game is produced.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The franchise has become a key driver of Activision’s success, analysts said.
The base game consistently sells more than 20 million units annually, not including the live services components that update after a game’s launch and keep players engaged, monthly battle passes that unlock rewards or even the mobile game, all of which add up to an estimated annual sales of about $3.5 billion to $4 billion, said Eric Handler, media and entertainment analyst at Roth Capital.
“It revolutionized the first-person shooter and has done a great job, year in and year out, of being the best of breed, building the largest community and evolving, pivoting to where video game players are all over the world,” Handler said. “There are other [shooter] franchises that are trying to replicate its success … but nobody’s been able to match the consistency of ‘Call of Duty.’”
To maintain its annual cadence, Activision rotates game development among several of its studios, including Playa Vista-based Treyarch, which co-developed “Black Ops 6” and “Black Ops 7” in parallel — the first time that two “Call of Duty: Black Ops” games came out in subsequent years.
The previous game is set in the ‘90s, while the newest installment jumps ahead to 2035, meaning designers and animators had to envision what gear and gadgets might look like in the future (“Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” was eerily accurate in its predictions for the year 2025).
“It was a huge opportunity for us to tell two unique but also connected stories at the same time,” said Yale Miller, senior director of production at Treyarch.
Unlike the linear nature of film production, many things happen in tandem when producing a game like “Call of Duty.” The game has a campaign mode that follows a story, a multiplayer option to play with friends and the ever-popular zombies portion, meaning each designated team is thinking in parallel about things like tone, features and playable moments that they want fans to experience, Miller said.
While an actor is recording lines, another team may be building the weapon they mention and making it interactive, while another group builds the explosion that the lines and weapon will be part of.
“It’s not just, ‘Oh, we got the shot. We’re done for the day,’ ” Miller said. The acting performance is “an anchor for a lot of the things that we build, but then it’s the whole world in parallel, and that’s how we get to such big teams working on stuff, and everything has to get thought about.”
The franchise has become known for its intense, cinematic quality, a reputation enhanced by the live-action film and television backgrounds of many who work on the games, including some stunt performers and Treyarch performance capture director Mikal Vega, who worked on the 2017 NBC drama “The Brave” after a long career in the military.
“It’s theater-in-the-round,” he said during a Zoom call from the stage. “A lot more like theater-in-the-round than film in some cases, and very much like film in other phases of it.”
And there is a bit of a learning curve, particularly because of the motion-capture technology used, which can make movements awkward.
In the new game, “This Is Us” star Milo Ventimiglia plays Lt. Cmdr. David Mason, a character who first appeared in 2012’s “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” and is now on the hunt for a former arms dealer who caused the death of his father and was previously believed dead.
Acting in “Black Ops 7” was “more technical” than his previous film and TV roles since it required getting used to a boom mic or camera that jutted out in front of him, he said. In one early instance, Ventimiglia went to scratch an itch on his cheek and was told by the crew not to put anything between his face and the camera, and to pantomime scratching outside of the camera, not realizing it wasn’t acting.
Then there were four-hour sessions in the sound booth, saying lines dozens of times in dozens of ways with any number of weapons.
“It’s super, super taxing, hard work, but fun at the same time,” Ventimiglia said. “When are you going to talk about calling out grenades and flash bangs and using different weapons? Very rarely.”
Adding to the cinematic quality are the hyper-realistic portrayals of actors, gear and costumes, which are the result of scans on a light stage that can re-create items in 3-D. Principal and background characters sit on a chair inside the sphere and do poses, surrounded by 16 DSLR cameras and dozens of hexagonal lights that emit a hazy glow. In 1.3 seconds, more than 256 images will be shot. Principal characters like Ventimiglia will typically do up to 120 poses — all to make sure the nuances of someone’s face are captured.
Evan Buttons, Activision director of technical projects, is photographed inside the face scanning studio.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
In a nearby room with a 22-foot ceiling and black, soundproof walls, an even larger sphere with more than 140 cameras and several video cameras are used to capture full body scans, gear and costumes. Everything captured then goes to the character art team, which will tweak it to their specifications and put it in the game.
Even in the days leading up to the game’s release, the team was still busy. In an era when internet speeds are faster, work doesn’t end with a game’s initial release. Content will be released regularly in the months after “Black Ops 7” debuts, all to keep it fresh for players, who can put more than 1,000 hours into the game.
“The No. 1 reason why they play ‘Call of Duty’ is actually because their friends are there,” said Bahl of Activision. “Those bonds and those social connections, I think, is really what makes this game different and stronger, and it’s made it last for so long.”
BBC viewers have been urged to look out for any clues as the broadcaster is reportedly gearing up to announce the return of one of its biggest shows very soon
23:45, 05 Nov 2025Updated 23:45, 05 Nov 2025
Line of Duty could be making a comeback very soon(Image: BBC)
A huge BBC drama is set to announce its comeback within a matter of days. Fans have been waiting on tenterhooks to see if another series will be released, and now the cast have finally aligned their schedules to make it happen.
The BBC are said to be gearing up to confirm Line of Duty will be back on screens for a seventh series. Fans have been urged to keep an eye out for any online announcements that will be followed by TV teaser trailers.
Now, it seems fans won’t have long to wait for an official announcement as a source said: “Although this has been discussed at length since the unsatisfactory ending of series six in 2021, it’s still going to create huge excitement when the Beeb makes the announcement.
“It’s one they’ve been preparing to make for weeks, but they’ve been trying to pick the right moment, since The Celebrity Traitors has been hogging quite a lot of limelight recently.” They added to Sun: “And the BBC very much view Line Of Duty as one of the jewels in its crown that they want to deliver with some fanfare.”
The BBC declined to comment when approached by the Mirror. Back in July, Actor Adrian said: “We’re really excited about getting our hands on a Line of Duty script, to see what happens to us.”
The Ridley star even teased what is to come on the programme, which could air in 2026, as he told The Times: “It is down to the BBC to make an announcement, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed that next year we’ll be working on a new series. No doubt Jed will think of some interesting twists and turns.”
Martin Compston played DS Steve Arnott in the show, which came to an end when his character and his team discovered the identity of “H”. He also shared details on whether viewers can expect more from the series.
“We’re always talking about possibilities and schedules and whatnot,” he said to The Sun. Martin didn’t dare share more and added: “Everybody’s got stuff going on at the minute, so I think anything, unfortunately, would be a way off.”
Before Martin discussed a potential new series, a source told the same publication that Adrian, Vicky McClure and Martin will reunite to film six new episodes. They said at the time: “This is the news Line of Duty fans have been waiting for since the sixth season left them deflated when it aired back in 2021.
“The BBC almost immediately requested more episodes to continue the story, but the success of the show meant Vicky, Martin and Adrian were instantly snapped up for other projects. But after several meetings with Jed [Mercurio, creator and writer] and the production team, they’ve finally managed to clear space in their calendars next year to commit to making the show.”
While last August, Adrian said that he was desperate to get back into character for another series. He told Good Housekeeping: “We all want another series.
“We filmed our last series in lockdown, which meant we didn’t get to do anything other than work, so we’re really keen to get together for one last hurrah.”
