Lío Mehiel has been working for a moment like “After the Hunt” for a long time.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, this thorny morality play of a film set at Yale University pits well-liked professor Alma (played by Julia Roberts) against both her protegé, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), as well as her longtime friend and colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) during a scandal that risks her entire academic career.
Amid that starry A-list cast, the actor plays Maggie’s partner, Alex. The film, which had its world premiere in August at the Venice Film Festival, is Mehiel’s most high-profile project yet.
“There is so much time as an artist where you are doing the work and nobody cares and you have to find within yourself the motivation and the commitment and the drive to keep going,” Mehiel tells The Times. “Because you know that when you are going to be able to reach people, it will be worth it.”
Such a step has been years in the making. Mehiel, who lived in Puerto Rico until they were 5 years old, began their creative endeavors almost as soon as they arrived in New York City, first as a salsa dancer and later as an actor. By the time they were in fifth grade they were attending Broadway auditions, eventually booking a role in the 2003 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” starring Ashley Judd and Jason Patric.
(L to R) Lio Mehiel as Alex and Ayo Edebiri as Maggie in AFTER THE HUNT, from Amazon MGM Studios.
But as they began finding their own sense of self and body, they also found the kind of opportunities that led them to “After the Hunt.” That began in earnest back in 2023, when they starred in Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s film “Mutt” as Feña, a role they booked after cold-emailing the director and telling them they’d do anything to win that part. The film chronicled a particularly hectic day in the life of a young trans man in New York City, as he struggles to rekindle old relationships he’d severed since he’d transitioned. Mehiel’s soulful performance won them a Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, putting them on the map as a trans Latine performer to watch.
“Moving forward from ‘Mutt,’ I was really interested in building on that momentum to what’s next,” they say. Not just in terms of their career but in the broader cultural conversation around contemporary queer and trans representation. The following year, they returned to Sundance with Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers,” which walked away from the festival with the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury prize — the first for a film directed by a Latina director. Like “Mutt,” that sun-dappled film found Mehiel breathing life into a trans character navigating a thorny relationship with their father (played by renowned Puerto Rican rapper Residente).
Mehiel has long been building a body of work that centers on the very work of having a body. Just this past summer, they visited the Salton Sea for a performance installation titled “angels of a drowning myth.” In photos from that day, Mehiel is seen naked and half-submerged into that so-called sea, posing alongside a bust of their own chest made six months after they’d received top surgery. A portrait of a body twice represented, Mehiel’s piece stressed the solidity and malleability of their own body, and the beauty they find within and around it. Their work moves past familiar ideas of the body in transition, gleefully embracing the messiness of the queer experience and refusing the easy siren call of visibility.
“‘After the Hunt,’ is such a beautiful example of that because Alex is a queer and trans character, but we just see them getting home from a run, taking their shirt off, being with their partner, dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with their queerness,” Mehiel says.
That moment Alex first appears on screen is quintessential Mehiel. Not just because of the honeyed intimacy their sweaty, bare chest exudes. But because their appearance immediately reframes everything audiences have heard about this seemingly militant, radical social justice warrior. Alex at first appears as a figure of “woke” culture there to defy the older generation Roberts’ Alma comes to stand for. But there’s more to them than that.
“Alex doesn’t represent all queer people who have a political orientation in the world, all queer people who might attend a protest,” they explain. “I think what Luca did and what Nora did in the script was to give us all an opportunity to move away from identity politics. Instead, they gave each of the characters enough meat on their bones that they get to be complex, messy characters.”
“After the Hunt” may focus on complicated ethical questions surrounding sexual assault allegations at a university, but within that plot, Mehiel sees also a chance for viewers to catch a glimpse of characters like Maggie and Alex who may not otherwise be centered in such stories.
“I’m just excited that there is more exposure that people are having to queer and trans people and to queer relationships, and how that can fit in the context of a ‘normative’ world,” they add. “This is a movie with Julia Roberts, one of our biggest stars and crown jewels of Hollywood and of American cinema. There’s going to be a lot of folks that are going to see it because Julia is in it. And then they’re also going to get to experience a queer and trans person on screen who is likable in some moments and unlikable in others, just as much as every other character.”
That’s been Mehiel’s purpose for years now: to expand what queer and trans characters can look like on stage, on screen and, in turn, in real life. At a time when these communities are vilified by those who wish to harm them, Mehiel insists on the importance of such normalized visibility.
Lio Mehiel seen at the Los Angeles Premiere of Amazon MGM Studios’ “After The Hunt” at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on October 04, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
(Photo by Stewart Cook / Amazon MGM Studios via Getty Images)
“Honestly, exposure to these experiences creates connection more than anything and allows people to feel comfortable,” they add. “Because the political climate right now — for the Latine community and for the trans community — is really hard and heartbreaking and challenging. And I think so much of it has to do with people feeling like they don’t know who these people are.”
A central kernel of the premise of “After the Hunt” is that you never know what someone is going through. And, more to the point, that making assumptions about other people’s experience can be extremely dangerous.
“This movie really serves as a mirror to the people that are watching it,” Mehiel insists. The film confronts audiences with their own biases and refuses any tidy conclusions.
But for Mehiel, the film will forever be remembered as a highlight of a career that is only bound to get bigger and more exciting. Just this year, they spent the summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival starring in Jeremy O. Harris’ new play as well as serving as head of production for “Mother, Daughter, Holy Spirit,” a grassroots fundraiser for the Trans Justice Funding Project, all while continuing to pursue their various interests as artist, writer, and filmmaker. In that context, “After the Hunt” stands now less as a calling card than as a reminder of how far they’ve come and yet how much further they want to go. That film, now playing in theaters and coming soon to Prime Video, will widen the scope and reach of their artistry.
“Watching it, I was like, ‘I fit right into the fabric of the movie,’” they say. “On a personal journey level, I feel confident that I have the skill, the talent and the experience at this point to work with the masters that I dream of working with (if the sexy French filmmaker, Julia Ducournau, ever reads this interview, she should know that I want to work with her).”
Or, in much simpler terms that echo an ethos they’ve brought to bear on and off screen: “I just feel ready and able to actualize the things that I have been dreaming about for a long time.”
This article contains spoilers from the first season of “The Paper.”
The journey to spin off the U.S. version of “The Office” has, until now, been long and slow. (That’s what she said.)
While the unconventional workplace comedy about a humdrum band of paper company employees, adapted from a beloved British series of the same name, famously got off to a sluggish start on NBC with a low-rated six-episode first season, it became a rare case study of how a risky gamble can become a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most popular sitcoms in TV history. Talks of expanding “The Office” universe began as early as Season 3, when another office branch was introduced. “Parks and Recreation” was initially conceived as a spinoff but morphed into a standalone series. Another centered on socially awkward Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) would get dropped. The series eventually ended its nine-season run in 2013 with no offshoot. But it still managed to have an afterlife without one, as fans obsessively continued to watch it in syndication or on streaming platforms.
Once “The Office” began making headlines in 2020 for the being the most streamed show in America, Greg Daniels, who captained the U.S. adaptation and was initially concerned about tarnishing its legacy with offshoots, was coming around to the idea that it was safely insulated enough to withstand any attempt to find a way to build out its kooky world.
Finally, more than a decade after “The Office” went off the air, Peacock is hoping the spinoff series “The Paper” can recycle some of that show’s success while finding its own path.
In “The Paper,” Domhnall Gleeson, left, stars as editor in chief Ned Sampson, and Tim Key plays executive Ken Davies.
(Aaron Epstein / Peacock)
This series shifts its focus to the staff at the Toledo Truth Teller, a struggling local newspaper in Ohio, which is being filmed by the same documentary crew that followed bumbling boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) and his Scranton, Pa.-based Dunder Mifflin employees. (It’s a believable documentary subject when you consider the U.S. has lost more than one-third of its newspapers since 2005.) Daniels created the series with Michael Koman (“Nathan For You,” “How to With John Wilson”).
All 10 episodes of the first season were released Thursday on Peacock, and the show has been picked up for a second season. Daniels and Koman visited The Times earlier this month — and spoke in follow-up video calls — to discuss the comedy potential of a beleaguered industry, why Oscar is the obvious choice to be the crossover character in the spinoff and whether they plan to reference the president’s comments about the press. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
The series was originally going to launch with four episodes, then switch to a weekly drop. But it was recently announced that the full season is dropping at once. What happened? And do you have strong feelings about release models?
Daniels: Every company is different. I do know that they’re [NBCUniversal] being incredibly supportive and there’s a giant team gaming out every move. I trust that they have the best of intentions and have a lot of good strategy. My inclination was always to sneak on the air without any fanfare whatsoever, and then maybe advertise after — that is very naive, apparently. One possible nice thing about it being handled this way is our superfans will be able to watch at their own convenience, and maybe before they’ve seen too many promos. I’ve always felt like the show was cut to be the introduction to the show itself. And the more you know jokes you see from later in the seasons, the more you’re coming at it with an unintended awareness of what’s to come. It may play better, just clean for all the superfans. Actually, I thought at first, the pace-out model would be good because that was how “The Office” was on NBC. But they did point out to me that probably the majority of “The Office” fans have watched it on streaming, where they could binge the whole thing.
Koman: It’s not really my area, but that’s how I like to watch things. I’m always happy when it’s up to me — I can make my own schedule, and I tend to watch things quickly.
The crisis facing local journalism doesn’t feel like an obvious backdrop for comedy — and if you’re in it, it’s more of a can’t-help-but-laugh–to-keep-from-crying vibe. How did you arrive at a newsroom as your backdrop and what was the pitch?
Daniels: You wouldn’t think that selling stationary was a particularly hilarious or glamorous place to set a show. I think that there are some intentional differences with this show, and in the sense that we didn’t want to repeat aspects of “The Office.” For me, I was incredibly protective of the original show and the cast. I just waited a long time to do something like this. The original “Office” cast was very supportive by the time it came about. Since it’s a documentary, if you’re going to really commit to that device, you have to think all the time about [how] there’s really camerapeople in the room; they’re trying to cover something; they wouldn’t be there to just cover what they thought was a funny workplace. They’re there to cover an actual story. And the hollowing out of local newspapers is an interesting story that you could imagine a documentary crew from PBS being like, “Oh, this is a good story.” Of course, since it’s a comedy show, the stuff that’s happening in the background is really the point of the show — all the funny interactions with people as they try to do stuff. Another way that we wanted it to be different was the whole interaction between Michael Scott and his staff — he was not a very inspirational boss, and Ned Sampson, played by Domhnall Gleeson, comes in and he does manage to inspire the people working there. And the question is more: Is he biting off way more than he can chew and his staff can chew? Or should they be right and believing in him?
Koman: I just think reality always makes the best backdrop. And it’s good if your characters are facing a challenge and you have something to root for.
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1.Clockwise from top left: Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute, Jenna Fischer as Pam Beesly, John Krasinksi as Jim Halpert, BJ Novak as Ryan Howard and Steve Carell as Michael Scott in “The Office.”2.Carell, Krasinksi and Wilson in a scene from the NBC comedy.(Justin Lubin / NBC Universal)
How did you land on Toledo?
Daniels: That was really about the alliteration of the Toledo Truth Teller. There’s something about the Cleveland Plain Dealer that I think is a super interesting thing. The name of it, I thought, has always been very intriguing. It kind of reminds you of the independence of these big Midwestern newspapers, which is different from now. It really feels like the big newspapers are L.A., New York, Washington, Dallas. I know the Cleveland Plain Dealer is still quite healthy, which is great. But there is something about the Midwest that feels nostalgic.
Koman: If I think of the heyday of print journalism, Ohio is just a place that comes to mind. They had so many really important newspapers and great journalists that came out of there, so it just seemed like … if somebody was going to try to revive something, that’s a state, and Toledo itself, is a place where you can see it happening.
Daniels: Toledo also has a certain “Office-y,” Scranton thing to it. There was a time where we were looking at where the other locations that Dunder Mifflin has offices. And the list is very funny. It’s like Yonkers and Nashua, New Hampshire. It’s all these words that are just kind of fun to roll off your tongue.
Greg, you had been resistant to the idea of expanding “The Office” universe. “Parks and Recreation” was originally meant to be a spinoff, but it eventually evolved away from that. Why now? What changed?
Daniels: There’s two questions. One is, why now? And part of that is that “Upload” [Daniels’ Prime Video series] is wrapping up. When we first started discussing it, I didn’t know what was going to happen with “Upload.” I had sold it and I was committed to being the showrunner and it kept getting picked up, so I kept having to put off thinking about any kind of [“The Office”] spinoff. But [the final season of] “Upload” is dropping Aug. 25. The other part of your your question — over the years, since the finale, the show had this enormous blow-up on Netflix. It just felt like this show is pretty bulletproof at this point. Even if we did a s— job with a spinoff, it’s not going to go back in time and mess up “The Office,” which was my concern. “The Office” was such a beautiful and rare confluence of the cast and the time and the format and the writers and everything — it seemed very arrogant to think you could pull that off again. But then after a while, it’s like, “Well, you got to try.” You can’t be intimidated out of ever doing anything.
Greg Daniels says the staff of a struggling newspaper is as relatable as their Dunder Mifflin predecessors: “That quality of morale being low is very ‘Office’-like. The tone is intended to be similar without having the characters be similar.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
How did you arrive at former Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez (Oscar Núñez) being the connecting character between the two shows?
Daniels: When you look at the finale of “The Office,” everybody was going off in their own direction that had a lot of, in my view, meaningful wrap-up of their story. Jim and Pam were moving to Boston with Darrell; Toby was in England. But Oscar didn’t really have a big arc. He was pretty much Oscar the whole way through, and it didn’t feel like it was going to undo anything with “The Office” to keep Oscar involved.
Koman: It made sense, just on a business level, that if one company was acquired by another, that some people would move over into that company. He was the one person who, I think, would have stayed.
Daniels: He was maybe the most self-possessed. He had the most dignity, I think, of most of the characters. The idea that the crew has found him again just seemed appropriate. He did run for elective office at the end of “The Office,” so I feel like he is susceptible to being inspired and do something for his community, so he seems like a person who could buy into what Ned is selling.
Koman: Also, he has kind of a cosmopolitan personality. The city is like a third larger than Scranton.
Greg, you gave us one of the great will–they/won’t–they relationships in TV history with Jim and Pam. There are a couple of office romances brewing on “The Paper.” The season ends with Ned and Mare (Chelsea Frei) kissing. Is there a specific challenge with crafting a slow burn in the streaming era? How did you want to approach things this time around?
Daniels: You need to have stakes in stories. If you’re going to be very realistic and relatable, the stakes in people’s stories are mostly romantic because most people don’t battle aliens to save the world or whatever. So, the highest stakes a normal person usually has is who they’re going to marry or who they’re seeing, or what drama they’re in in their personal lives. There’s a column the New York Times does about people who are getting married, how-they-met kind of thing, which I love, and you realize that there’s hundreds and hundreds of stories of how people meet. It’s not all Sam and Diane or Pam and Jim. My aim would be to not have the audience be like, “Who’s the next Pam and Jim? Is that Pam and Jim?” That’s their relationship. Those two actors were brilliant. You can’t replicate it, but it doesn’t mean that other characters aren’t going to be romantically interested in each other.
Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) and Jim Halpert (John Kraskinski), the friends-to-lovers duo affectionately known as JAM, in a scene from “The Office.” (Paul Drinkwater/NBC)
“The Paper” features characters like interim managing editor Esmeralda (Sabrina Impacciatore), compositor turned reporter Mare (Chelsea Frei) and new boss Ned (Domhnall Gleeson). Mare and Ned have a will-they/won’t-they dynamic in the sitcom. (Aaron Epstein/Peacock)
We had a sense, at least through Kelly Kapoor and her pop culture references, that “The Office” took place in our shared reality, but it didn’t directly comment on real world matters. But considering the show’s setting and Ned’s idealism about the profession, with President Trump’s ongoing remarks about the press, can you see a day where those remarks or ideas are more directly referenced in some form? Or do you want to stay clear of that?
Daniels: I think there’s so many voices that [are] constantly talking about that, just from a comedy standpoint; I’m very tired of it. There’s also so many opinions that are so strong. My inclination is to do the fundamentals — it’s a character comedy. These are characters. They’re in a world of journalism [and it] has a lot of bumping between human beings and ethics, and to tell those stories is valuable. No matter what side you’re on, you can look at it and, hopefully, if there’s truth in what’s being presented, you can take something valuable away.
Koman: It’s important to think of this as a local paper. Their struggle is to credibly tell local stories, which is what I think the city needs, more than anything — a voice to just tell people what’s going on. Beyond that, I think the way that a culture will seep into a show like this — you should always have a sense of reality and that this is taking place in the present. I think of their minds as being focused on: How can we be a good news source for Toledo?
Michael Koman, who previously worked on docu-comedies “Nathan For You” and “How To With John Wilson,” on capturing the state of journalism realistically in “The Paper”: “What makes newspapers different than other businesses or other jobs is that people do arrive with a sense of enthusiasm for what they’re going to do. It seemed important that many of these people could have started their jobs like this, but now we’re meeting them at a point where that’s been tamped down enormously.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The impulse when you hear about a spin-off or a reboot is to compare and to see who fits into what archetypes. Tell me about the types of characters you wanted to fill out in this newsroom.
Daniels: We tried to avoid that. What’s the point of doing something where everybody can go, “Oh, that’s the new Dwight”? They’re working in journalism and they have a very romantic, idealistic boss. He’s extremely interested in getting to the bottom of stories and being super rigorous and ethical, but he’s come in and replaced the temporary managing editor, Esmeralda, played by Sabrina Impacciatore, who has a very different view. She doesn’t really drill down that hard. She’s more about getting eyeballs.
Koman: What makes newspapers different than other businesses or other jobs is that people do arrive with a sense of enthusiasm for what they’re going to do. It seemed important that many of these people could have started their jobs like this, but now we’re meeting them at a point where that’s been tamped down enormously. Morale is low. In terms of who this group of people was, you could feel like that’s been dampened enormously and somebody new can come in who, either out of naivety or just optimism, thinks that he can revive it.
Daniels: That quality of morale being low is very “Office”-like. The tone is intended to be similar without having the characters be similar.
The title sequence is a montage of the various ways people make use of newspapers — rather than reading it. How would you describe your relationship to print journalism?
Daniels: When I first moved out here, I had a subscription to the L.A. Times, and the volume of papers was so gigantic, and it would come with these white ties to hold it all together. I built furniture in my apartment out of stacks of L.A. Times because they were so big. So it’d be like two weeks of them, I could make a stool and make a table with a full week’s worth stacked up.
Koman: Yes, I would say that digital media is all well and good until you need to pack glasses, then you hunt for a newspaper.
Daniels: One of my earliest memories is my parents trying to read the newspaper on their bed, and I wanted their attention, so I would roll onto the newspapers and look up at them, which would really irritate them. They were a big newspaper household.
Much like the news media, your industry is confronting budget constraints and technological disruption that is forcing changes to business models and programming strategies. What are your concerns about your industry right now?
Daniels: One of the big themes is the return to advertising. The streamers have all added ad tiers and that naturally is going to change the programming a bit. I don’t think, necessarily, [that] it’s bad. When you look at the heyday of Netflix, a lot of their biggest stuff had been developed under the old advertising model. I sometimes think about the French movie business, where it seems like they don’t care if something makes money or not. It’s just, if you’re in the club, you get to make movies over and over again. I’ve always felt like that there’s something more democratic about: You actually have to get people to watch your thing somehow.
Koman: The strangest thing about this industry is that it might change a lot, [but] the thing you’re making is a timeless product. You’re telling a story. There’s the part of it that is like, “Well, this will eventually be finished and will be presented somewhere” — and you have no control over how that’s going to change. But what you’re actually trying to make would have to hold up under any conditions.
Jennifer Aniston just came out with an unexpected, wistful comment about her “Friends” co-star Matthew Perry’s death: Part of her, she said, thinks it might be “better” for him that he died.
“We did everything we could when we could,” the “Morning Show” star said in an interview published Monday by Vanity Fair, talking about Perry’s friends’ attempts to help him when he was struggling with addiction. “But it almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight.”
Indeed, Perry discussed his friends’ efforts to help him in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” which recounted his decades-long struggles with substance abuse as well as his numerous recovery efforts.
“Although he asserts he was never high while filming ‘Friends,’ he’d often be sick or hungover,” former staff writer Christina Veta wrote in The Times’ review of the memoir. “Once, Perry passed out on the Central Perk couch and [co-star Matt] LeBlanc had to nudge him awake to say his line. Later, Aniston called him out for drinking again, telling him, ‘We can smell it.’”
Perry told Aniston, “I know I’m drinking too much, but I don’t exactly know what to do about it.”
“In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better,” he wrote in his memoir. “This is what my costars on Friends did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney [Cox], being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage. In between rehearsals and takes, I’d head back there and ride that thing like the fires of hell were chasing me — anything to get my brain power back to normal. I was the injured penguin, but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down.”
Aniston told Vanity Fair in the new interview, “looking solemn and out toward the ocean” as she spoke about Perry’s death, “As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better. I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”
Perry said in his memoir that amid all his drinking and drug use, he was never suicidal.
“In the back of my mind I always had some semblance of hope. But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept,” he wrote about the period after “Friends” ended.
“That’s how skewed my thinking had become — I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I don’t want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion.”
Almost exactly a year after the memoir came out, on Oct. 28, 2024, at 4 in the afternoon, Perry was found dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home. The drug ketamine would later emerge as his official cause of death, with drowning a contributing factor.
ATLANTA — The center fielder for the Dodgers’ Class A Great Lakes affiliate is a former first-round draft pick. The other two outfielders were selected for the Futures Game.
Who’s the best outfielder on the team?
“We’re all good, brother,” said the left fielder, Josue De Paula. “We’ve all got talent. We all excel somewhere.
“Us together? It’s a dream squad. I don’t feel like you see that much talent that often.”
De Paula flashed his considerable talent Saturday, hitting a three-run homer that decided the National League’s 4-2 victory over the American League and earned him the Futures Game most valuable player award.
The only other Dodgers prospect to win that award: infielder Chin-Lung Hu, in 2007.
“This is definitely motivating for me,” De Paula said. “Mentally, it was a big moment, to prove, especially to myself, who I really am.”
De Paula’s home run traveled 416 feet, triggering a round of fireworks in the sky and a lump in De Paula’s throat as he crossed home plate.
“I was overtaken by emotion,” he said, “especially doing it in front of my dad.”
His father lives in New York City. The Midwest League is far away.
Perhaps the major leagues are not so far away. De Paula is 20, but he is in his fourth pro season. The Dodgers signed him out of the Dominican Republic, but he was born in New York City and he is a second cousin of former NBA All-Star Stephon Marbury.
“Baseball called me,” De Paula said. “I fell in love with it at a young age.”
Zyhir Hope, the Great Lakes right fielder, also appeared in the Futures Game. He singled ahead of De Paula and scored on the home run, so he was waiting at home plate to congratulate De Paula.
“We do it often,” De Paula said, smiling.
Hope, also 20, smiled when asked what he liked about De Paula’s game.
“Everything,” he said. “He takes it easily. He’s calm, relaxed and laid back, but he works hard. He’s a great dude.”
Before the season, Baseball Prospectus ranked De Paula and Hope among the top 10 prospects in baseball. Currently, MLB Pipeline ranks both among the top 40.
De Paula offers power, speed, and advanced plate discipline, although scouts wonder whether he can stick in left field or might need to try first base or designated hitter. Hope has advanced from a good-fielding prospect with uncertain hitting skills in the Chicago Cubs’ system — the Dodgers got him in the Michael Busch trade — to a gap hitter with speed.
This is the time of year, of course, where contenders trade prospects to fill major league needs. Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, rarely trades his top prospects, and De Paula ranks No. 1 in the Dodgers’ farm system. On the other hand, the Dodgers need pitching help.
“I do want to get to L.A. I hope that’s in God’s plans,” De Paula said. “At the end of the day, we never make the decisions. We’ve just got to focus on what we need to do on the field and whatever happens, happens.
“But I really do hope I become a Dodger and I stay there for a very long time.”
Clippers executives were serious when they said they had not soured on James Harden’s future with the franchise after an underwhelming postseason performance.
Harden declined his player option for $36 million with the Clippers on Sunday and intends to sign a two-year deal with the team for $81.5 million, league sources with knowledge of the deal not authorized to discuss it publicly said. The second year is a player option and is partially guaranteed.
The deal gave Harden a raise and the Clippers some salary flexibility going forward.
“He’s our No. 1 priority,” Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations, told the media after the first round of the draft Wednesday night. “We’re super hopeful that James is here and he’s here for a long time. He has a player-option, so he can opt-in … or he can opt-out and hopefully we can do a deal that makes sense for both sides. But James, as you guys know, was phenomenal and we hope to continue to see his play.”
Though the Clippers drafted a center in the first round with the 30th pick, getting Yanic Konan Niederhauser of Penn State, Frank said his team “probably will have at least three centers.”
The Clippers can use their non-taxpayer mid-level exception that’s projected to be about $14.1 million on a player or two, and perhaps even find a center.
Harden played in 79 games this past season, played the fifth-most total minutes in the NBA (2,789), was fifth in the league in assists (8.7), averaged 22.8 points per game and was the only player with 1,500 points, 500 assists, 100 steals and 50 blocks.
Harden, however, struggled during the postseason, averaging 18.7 points per game in the series the Clippers lost to the Nuggets. He scored just 33 points combined in Games 4, 5 and 7 losses, including seven points in Game 7.
Clippers guard James Harden looks to shoot during the team’s win over San Antonio Spurs on April 8 at Intuit Dome.
(Carrie Giordano / Associated Press)
Harden turns 36 in August and was not made available to speak with media during traditional exit interviews every team typically hosts to close out a season.
“When it was James this year with no Kawhi, with Norm [Powell] and [Ivica] Zubac and the rest of the group, we really asked James to do a lot,” Frank said shortly after the Clippers were eliminated from the playoffs.
“And at his age to deliver what he did…[He played in] 79 games, and he does that time and time and time again. We have a deep appreciation for that sort of availability and to be able to deliver and do what he did…We have a great level of appreciation for what James did this year.”
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.”
