Netflix's split season strategy is ruining my favorite shows — and ‘Wednesday' is the latest victim
Fast forward to today, and Netflix's split seasons have taken that suffering to a whole new, infuriating level. Take "Wednesday" season 2: Four episodes dropped, ending with a massive cliffhanger until next month. These short, split seasons leave fans dangling instead of letting us fully immerse ourselves in the story. This release strategy has turned what should be entertainment into a test of patience.
Let's be real: Most of us barely have one-minute Insta-reel attention spans. Expecting fans to follow this split-season format is cruel — especially now that Netflix has gone from $7.99 in 2011 to $17.99 in 2025.
Netflix needs to pick a lane: episodic releases or full-season drops. Both approaches have merits: Episodic keeps fans coming back weekly while full-season drops satisfy instant-gratification cravings that made early streaming so appealing. I could even tolerate an initial two-to-four episode drop followed by consistent weekly releases (which Netflix does with some of its reality shows, like "Love Is Blind"). What I can't stand is giving us breadcrumbs, then forcing another month or more of waiting. For eight-to-10 episode seasons, it's maddening.
The hype fizzles during the wait, viewers get distracted, and even clever Easter eggs can't save a fractured storytelling experience. Other Netflix shows — "Bridgerton," "Cobra Kai," "Stranger Things" — have fallen into the same trap, stretching short seasons across months instead of being delivered as a cohesive story.
The frequency of steep hikes in monthly costs makes it feel like Netflix users are getting less for more money. Many have already dropped the streamer from their ever-expanding roster of subscriptions. Jerking fans around with transparent bait-and-switch release schedules isn't going to do much to retain their already wavering loyalty.
This fractured approach hurts Netflix too. Originals once followed a reliable one-season-per-year model; now, we're lucky to see one every two or three. Short seasons split into multiple drops make it hard to maintain excitement, and viewers increasingly grow jaded. Meanwhile, subscription prices keep rising, alienating fans just as their patience is being tested.
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I sometimes find myself nostalgic for the old-school episodic rhythm — weekly anticipation, fan theories and discussions all added a layer of charm. If Netflix wants to have it both ways — a binge release in batches — it could split seasons over two weeks instead of two months. But their current release schedule? Sorry, Netflix, but it's just not it.
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3 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Comedian Who Found Success Insulting Celebrities Made a Surprisingly Emotional One-Man Show — But More Roasts Are Coming, Too
If you're not familiar with Jeff Ross, he is best known as the 'Roastmaster General' — a three-decade master of the savage comic sport introduced by the Friars Club in the 1950s, in which a procession of comedians and wannabe smart-asses barrage a roastee with decidedly no-holds-barred insults crafted to evoke laughter and gasps. Ross is also executive producer of Netflix's celebrity roasts as well as a writer and a performer on them, including the headlines-making mocking of former NFL quarterback and seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady. Ross was the subject of many of the headlines that the Brady roast generated because he directed a 'massage' joke at Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was arrested in 2019 for soliciting prostitution in a Florida massage parlor. (The charges were dropped.) The joke prompted Brady — who took most of the barbs directed at him with grace — to walk across the stage and whisper to Ross, whose microphone was live, 'Don't say that s—t again.' More from Billboard Get 'Ice Cream Chillin' With Ninja's New Soft Serve Machine: Here's Where to Find It Online Shop Bang & Olufsen's Audio Deals on Speakers & Headphones Online - And Save up to $500 Ahead of Tony Hinchcliffe's First Return to Madison Square Garden Since Trump Rally, He's Still Not Sorry Brady and Ross embraced after the comedian's set, but Kevin Hart, who hosted the roast, had an insult waiting. 'Make sure to check out Jeff's one-man show. It's playing at the Hollywood Cemetery,' Hart said. 'His career is literally dying. If we stop doing these roasts, you will not see Jeff Ross ever again.' Hart was dead wrong. Ross does have a one-man show, Take A Banana For The Ride, which opens on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre on Aug. 18 and runs through Sept. 28, and its humor is nothing like the brand of comedy for which he is best known. Take A Banana is a sweet, heartfelt — and very funny — autobiographical homage to his parents, his grandfather (the show's title comes from him), the German Shepherd rescues that brightened his world at a low point in his life, and three good friends who died too soon: the comedians Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget and Norm Macdonald. It also delves into Ross' battle with colon cancer, and the circumstances and inflences that led him to become a comedian. There's music, too, which Ross wrote with another comedian, Avery Pearson. One song is called, 'Don't F—k With The Jews.' In his dressing room at the Nederlander following a rehearsal, Ross spoke to Billboard about the origins of his one-man show, his career in comedy, the foreclosure and sale of the New York Friars Club's landmarked townhouse headquarters and that Brady roast. 'You know I'm in it, man. I'm f—king in it,' he says. 'This is one of the craziest, most surreal moments of my life.' And he's loving it. is the last thing I expected from you. You need to make that your headline. It sounds like a compliment. How does a guy known as the Roastmaster General create such a touching, heartfelt show? I started writing it long before I was the roast guy. The heart of it happened before I discovered the roasts — or the roasts discovered me. I started writing stuff down and saving stuff in high school. There are actually things from high school that I found in notebooks that are in the show. And in the mid-'90s, I started doing this show because I wasn't really hitting it as a standup yet. It even had the same title. I did it 20-30 times. I certainly hadn't found the roasts yet. If anything, the roasts are what took me away from the show. This was obviously before the cancer diagnosis and your dogs. You've added a lot. I forgot about it for 20-something years. I didn't forget about it, it just wasn't interesting to me to look back. It wasn't the cancer diagnosis that inspired the look back. It was losing Gilbert [Gottfried] and [Bob] Saget and Norm [Macdonald]. That made me look back and go, what was I saying about grief and mourning and bouncing back and resilience when I was a kid, compared to how I feel now? That inspired me to revive the old show. The show is also about the life experiences that led you to become a comedian. It was the trickle of living in New Jersey where ball-busting is the love language — where all the radio stations and sports teams say they're from New York, so you get a bit of a chip on your shoulder. It was working in my dad's catering hall as a boy and as a teenager. My entire childhood was being the boss's son and having all the Scottish and Irish waitresses and waiters, the Russian guy making fruit salads, the Hungarian guy who made the Jell-O molds and the Haitian guys in the kitchen busting my chops for being the boss's son. Getting bullied as a little kid and my mom dragging me off to karate school. It's all of these things. They toughened me up. The origin story, at least how I tell it in the show, is all this stuff. If I had to point to one pivotal thing, then it's that first roast. That's right, you got your black belt in karate when you were quite young. Second youngest black belt in the United States. Good luck researching that one. Does it help with being a comedian? It helped get me the confidence to talk smack for a living, for sure. How did you bring this show to Broadway? That was something I was saying as a joke. Oh, I'd love to do it on Broadway. Or other people would say it, and I would do superstitious stuff like my mom did. She used to go ptuh-ptuh-ptuh. Then, in the last couple of years, Jim Carrey taught me about manifesting. He said, 'If you don't believe it, who's going to believe it? You have to speak it into truth.' That also motivated me to make the show better. To make something really great is an unbelievable amount of work — whether it was getting my black belt at ten-and-a-half or producing The Roast. Then, by chance, an old Friars Club pal, Marc Cornstein, grabbed ahold of the idea of taking it to Broadway. He started raising money and hooked me up with the Nederlanders. There's a musical element to . You have a keyboardist and a violin player onstage with you. Asher Denberg is our musical director and the keyboardist onstage. Felix Herbst is the violinist. Having some music in the show is my way of paying tribute to some of the older comics who always did that type of thing. There's a song about my dog from the voice of my German Shepherd, 'You're One of the Good Ones.' And there's the singalong about my family and my origin story called 'Don't F—k With The Jews.' I love comedians, but I also really love musicians. I love Broadway music. We're listening to show tunes all day in my dressing room and at rehearsal. So being able to work in a world-class theater with world-class musicians — comedians always say they want to host the Oscars. For me it was always the Grammys. I love music, and I love the musicians and a bunch of them are coming to opening night. You wrote the songs? I co-wrote them with my friend Avery Pearson. What are some of the show tunes you listen to backstage, and do you like any contemporary artists? I love new music. Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo are favorites — and I first saw Benson Boone at Clive Davis' Grammys party, and instantly fell in love with his music and showmanship. But in the dressing room before my show, I've been listening to Man of La Mancha a lot. I've been very influenced by 'The Impossible Dream' and 'Man of La Mancha.' Maybe because my parents had the 8-track. How did you get into the roast business? It was a happy accident. I have to credit my pal Greg Fitzsimmons for inviting me to his dad's honorary golf tournament. It was a Friars Club tournament at a golf club in New Jersey, and [Friars Dean] Freddie Roman was teasing me and picking on me because no one knew who I was. I walked up and started making fun of him. He was so loud and boisterous. I said they call him Freddie Roman because you can hear him in Italy. It was such a small joke, but no one had ever taken a swing at the head of the Friars before, especially some goofball kid that nobody knew. Months later, they couldn't get any stars to do the roast. It was corny and antiquated. I got the call from [executive director] Jean-Pierre [Trebot] at the Friars Club. He said, 'You were funny at the golf club. Do you want to do the roast?' I had to go to the Museum of Broadcasting to see what the roasts were about. This was 30 years ago, so I couldn't look it up on Google or YouTube. I was more into the rock 'n' roll comedy of Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy and the Blues Brothers, but I said, 'This is kind of funny.' I'm kind of like this anyway. I didn't really care much about Steven Seagal, who was being roasted, but I was taken by the idea of being up there with Buddy Hackett and Henny Youngman and Milton Berle who were all there at my first roast. You made it into a career. Well, it became my lane. There were years where it was lucrative but not necessarily cool. And then I got advice from Dave Chappelle that it was my job to make my lane a six-lane highway. I embraced that and realized I can't keep waiting for celebrities to agree to get roasted in a tuxedo. I have to figure out other ways to do it. That birthed the idea of me speed-roasting volunteers from the audience at my standup shows, the roast battles and the historical roasts. I even roasted at a jail. It's on Paramount+. Jeff Ross Roasts Criminals Live from Brazos County Jail. Is it true that celebrities would hire you to write jokes so that they would look good when it was their turn to roast or to be roasted? I wouldn't say I was hired by them. I was always a producer and a writer on those shows, and part of my responsibility would be the booking, writing, the promotion and appearing on the show. Back then, The Roast had a small budget, and we did everything. I wore a lot of hats — I guess I still do, but I have a lot more help now. Roast jokes are often politically incorrect, anti-woke — whatever terminology you prefer. What do you make of the whole woke vs. anti-woke humor debate? I feel like it's something that everyone talks about except the comedians. To me it's binary in a different way than woke or not woke. It's funny or not funny. It never affected me. People are telling me that the Tom Brady roast – because there hadn't been one in five years — helped recalibrate mainstream comedy a little bit back to let's call it normal or edgy or irreverent. I'm proud of that notion, but in Jeff Ross Land it's always roast time. It's just that the rest of the world is catching up. I saw it firsthand Saturday night after the show here at the Nederlander. I went out to sign Playbills and say hi to people, and there were three sets of teenage boys with their dads. I found it striking that 13, 14, 15-year-old boys were knowing me from the Tom Brady roast. From there they look at the Justin Bieber roast and the jail roast. Then they go 'Oh, that's roasting. I'm going to do that with my friends.' It's a sign of affection. It's their version of karaoke. That makes me immensely happy. That was always the motto at the Friars Roasts. We do it with love. I always felt like the roasts were the extensions and celebrations of friendships. I feel like my show is similar. It's a tribute to some of the people who made me who I am. Because it's about them I can do it every night. If it was only about me, I would have a hard time getting past the first week. I would get bored. But I really feel proud when I'm standing there and the video message that Bob [Saget] sent me plays or Gilbert sings a song from Fiddler on the Roof. They're getting one more turn at the mic. Do you have any rules for roasting? My general rule for roasting is to only roast volunteers. Once they opt in, anything goes. What went through your head when Tom Brady said what he said to you at his roast? Virtually nothing was going through my head when Brady interrupted me, except 'keep going.' We were having fun, and I always love a little verbal sparring during the roasts. Tom was sticking up for a father figure, and I respect that. Mr. Kraft was very gracious, and a great sport afterwards. Was Brady aware of how vicious his roast was going to get? I don't think any of us knew how rough that roast was going to be. I mean, from the get-go: Kevin Hart, me, Nikki [Glaser], Tony [Hinchcliffe] Andrew [Schulz], Gronk. We all went as hard as we could. And once you see Tom being a good sport and taking the jokes so well, you put your foot on the gas. But the real bravery was Tom saying yes in the first place. You've got to give him credit for agreeing to do a roast after no one, for five years, would say yes. This guy had the thick skin and was so confident in who he was that he said, 'Yeah.' I said to him, 'Why are you doing this?' He was like, 'I love the roasts, and I want to bring it all back.' To his credit and I guess to the credit of the roast, everything he would want from his life career-wise seems to have worked out great. He immediately became part owner of a team. He immediately launched this incredible broadcasting career, and he's doing Super Bowl commercials with his old teammates. I feel like the roast kind of melted away some of the ice that he may have had with his coach and his owner and maybe even his players. I think it did a lot for him. Are there more Netflix roasts on the boards? We have something cooking, but I can't talk about it yet. What do you make of the Friars Club's New York headquarters being sold in foreclosure? The Friars Club thing hurts because it feels like that's my alma mater. It especially hurts now because I always had this fantasy of doing a Broadway show, then going to lunch at the Friars Club and having everybody come over and tell me how much they loved it. This would have been a great time to be a Friar for me. Now I'm at the Yard House. It's not quite the same. The jambalaya is good, but it's not quite the Friars Club, where you would see people in the steam room, in the gym and there was a poker tournament, a pool tournament, a charity fundraiser. And then there were big events like the roasts. That is sadly in the past, and it breaks my heart. In terms of manifesting what's next for Jeff Ross? A cup of tea. A puff of weed. Get into my costume. I get to ride this incredible wave of emotions and laughs every night for the next two months. I've never done anything for two months in comedy. I'm not looking past this. When I was a young — before I became a comedian — my Aunt Bess would take me to Broadway shows. She took me to see Jackie Mason do his one-person show. I thought it was so cool. He didn't have dancers, he didn't have music, it was just him ripping the roof off the theater for an hour-and-a-half. I was like wow, that is the pinnacle of show business. If I can do that then I'm good. I can see myself retiring. That's how much I like doing this gig. Best of Billboard Kelly Clarkson, Michael Buble, Pentatonix & Train Will Bring Their Holiday Hits to iHeart Christmas Concert Fox Plans NFT Debut With $20 'Masked Singer' Collectibles 14 Things That Changed (or Didn't) at Farm Aid 2021 Solve the daily Crossword
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35 Bedroom Products To Make Your Love Your Space
A piece of pre-framed artwork you can just buy and hang right away. That's right — no more buying prints and thinking you'll get the frame later. The frame never comes, the prints stack up, your walls cry. These fancy prints are based on real artwork (peep the cat-ified version of Matisse's The Goldfish) so you can feel extra fancy. A glamorous set of feather-trim pajamas that look like something Dolly Parton might lounge in. They're great for bridal parties, sleepovers, and all-day lounge-fests in bed. A ribbon bookmark so the novel on your bedside table can double as charming decor. It may even convince you to finally finish Ulysses. A Kitsch satin pillowcase that'll be gentle on your hair, leave fewer creases in your face (huge win for side and stomach sleepers), and just feel nice and cool on your skin. If you're planning on spending a lot of time in bed, your pillowcase should be nice! A headboard lamp for anyone who loves the ample lighting options found in fancy hotels. 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With the help of the wrist rest, phone holder, and built-in mouse pad, you can extend couch time indefinitely. Or a gaming/reading/laptop pillow in a convenient U shape and with a lil' side pocket for remotes, snacks, etc. This thing will be like your command center for Zoom calls, Stardew Valley sessions, and snooping on your ex on Instagram. 🤫 Pleated paper shades if you find that the sun is waking up way before you. This affordable solution is easy to apply (just trim, peel, stick) and comes with clips to raise or lower them. Now you can do some *real* snoozing. A set of wildly popular "hotel" pillows so you can feel like you're falling asleep at the Ritz. Reviewers rave that these are the perfect balance of fluffy and firm, meaning you can prop yourself up for a good in-bed TV binge. Plus, they're breathable and cooling so you won't overheat while wrapped in all those blankets. 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A scrunchie or hair claw holder because I KNOW you turn the whole house upside down looking for one of those suckers every other morning. Now you'll know where to put/find them AND it'll look really cute if you have a fun collection to show off in your room. A pack of 12 shoe storage boxes that snap together so you can finally take care of Shoe Mountain. Your guests will appreciate not having to climb over your pile of sneakers to get to your room, your boots will appreciate not being squished into pancakes, and you'll appreciate actually being able to see all the pairs in your collection. A digital alarm clock so beautiful, you may finally use an actual clock over your phone. Best of all, it has three USB ports so you can charge said phone. A three-blade blinds cleaner with five removable microfiber sleeves so you can clean twice as fast. Now you can stop dusting and go back to snooping on your neighbors from your bedroom. 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Cosmopolitan
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Madelyn Cline and KJ Apa Cover Cosmopolitan for ‘The Map That Leads to You'
'Should I cut all my hair off?' Madelyn Cline asks, pulling her blond waves out of an updo. 'I was thinking of getting a pixie cut and—' KJ Apa cuts her off: 'No, no, no,' he says, incredulously. 'You're crazy right now—you've been working too long. When you work too long, you start thinking, Maybe I should dye my hair pink, or maybe just shave it all off! I love your hair. Don't chop it off.' It feels like I've crashed a private catch-up between friends versus what I'm actually doing, interviewing two costars on a press tour. The actors each rose to fame on the waves of teenage TV catnip; Madelyn on Netflix's hit Outer Banks,¹ KJ on the seven-season CW show Riverdale. And now their paths—and palpable chemistry—have converged in The Map That Leads to You, a Prime Video romantic drama by director Lasse Hallströn.² 1. Outer Banks season 4 debuted with a whopping 1.2 billion minutes watched, making it a huge success for Netflix. To no one's surprise, the show will return for season 5 in 2026. 2. The director behind What's Eating Gilbert Grape and nearly all of ABBA's music videos, fun fact. In the movie, Madelyn plays a straitlaced student named Heather who collides with KJ's spontaneous stranger Jack while on a Mamma Mia!–coded European sabbatical. 'It turns her girls' trip upside down in the best way possible,' explains Madelyn. 'They say opposites attract, and together Heather and Jack form one very complete Venn diagram.' In real life, Madelyn and KJ's bond is less 'opposites attract' and more 'two kids with race car brains hyped up on pixie sticks,' a pair of sprinting hares in a world of tortoises. In the beginning, they had only a passing familiarity with each other's work. KJ first caught an episode of Outer Banks while shooting The Map That Leads to You, and Madelyn watched season 1 of Riverdale while recovering from wisdom-tooth surgery (meaning, she remembers basically none of it). Yet the two have obviously now forged a deep, if chaotic, friendship full of playful fighting, flirting, and finishing each other's sentences. 'I always know that whenever KJ and I are going to be doing something together, it's going to be an absolute mess and a really good time,' Madelyn says. 'We're like Mr. and Mrs. Smith—if it was mixed with Dumb and Dumber.' Where does that leave our chances of staying on topic during this interview? Truthfully: doomed. KJ: I do now. So much crazy stuff happened while we were shooting. MC: Oh my god. KJ: We spoke to this dude who clued us in to how you have relationships with people in your current life that you potentially had relationships with in the past. MC: He told me that in a past life, we lived in Italy and I was your mom. KJ: Yeah! Wasn't it in the 1800s? MC: And then in another past life, we were brother and sister. KJ: Now we're just colleagues. MC: We got downgraded. KJ: I will say this: A good 60 percent of what he said has not happened. MC: True, but I think that's because we asked him for specifics. He did say that, for our mutual friend Alex Fine,³ this was his first lifetime on Earth and he's an alien. That I believe! KJ: We all believe that because, honestly, he doesn't have any logical sense. 3. A triple threat in his own right, having founded the wellness/fitness company Almost Home, acted in 1883 and American Primeval, and married singer Cassie, with whom he has three kids. KJ: With Madelyn, I felt like we'd known each other for a while. Everything was just easy. I wish it was like that working with most actresses. What can you say? Look at her, she's an absolute monkey beast. KJ: Basically, being a beast is all know what? I can't say it. It's just something you feel in someone. MC: If you know, you know. If a fellow beast is looking at you and says, 'I see you…you're one of us, you're a beast,' then you don't question it. KJ: I'd go to the dentist, honestly. I haven't been to the dentist in a long time. MC: Oh wait, I haven't either. We should make an appointment. KJ: I have a 3-year-old⁴ and any spare time I get, I'm doing my own shit. So honestly, I wouldn't go anywhere. I'd stay home and get all the things that I need to get done done. MC: That's some real dad shit. Daddy beast. If I had time off— KJ: I bet you would choose to work. MC: You're completely correct.⁵ If I had a month off and I could somehow make work happen, I would do that. Or I would stay home and sleep. I love sleep. I love being in my enclosure. I find it to be so much fun being nonverbal. 4. KJ shares his son with ex-girlfriend Clara Berry.5. Madelyn's filmography reflects her hustle: In addition to The Map That Leads to You, she was recently in I Know What You Did Last Summer and continues to lead Outer Banks. KJ: I want that to happen to me, honestly. It's lonely these days. MC: I think yes, but for me, it usually happens through work or mutuals. KJ: Honestly, cool things still happen to me in real life sometimes. I was flying back from Paris and the flight attendant gave me her number on a napkin. I loved that. MC: Did she really? KJ: Oh yeah, and I hung out with her. MC: You did? KJ: I did. I'm not going to tell you what we did. But also, I find that the grocery store is another great way to meet people.⁶ People aren't really on their phones much, so it's an easy way to have conversations. 6. Is KJ being 100 percent serious about all this? Maybe not. Did we still publish it verbatim just in case? 100 percent. KJ: Yeah. Honestly, for me too, I can just ask my son to go talk to a girl for me. I say, 'Go tell that girl I love her.' KJ: One time. My son is so unashamed. He'll just go do whatever I tell him to do. KJ: He's a beast. And he knows what he's doing, I'll say that. MC: He learned from the best. KJ: Not accurate. Because a lot of the time, he goes up to the wrong woman. MC: I don't have a son to do that with yet. KJ: I'm your son! MC: You have been. My son with an even tinier son. We're like a Russian doll set. KJ: I'm your freaky beast. MC: As soon as we get together, all of a sudden we start talking in code. MC: Yeah, it's funny. KJ operates solely on feeling. He leads with how something makes him feel, and if it doesn't make him feel a certain way, he's on to something else. KJ: I'd say that's accurate. By the way, that's why I'm sober now. MC: I know this because I'm your mom. MC: I can be spontaneous and instinctual, but I'm also a workaholic. KJ: I mean, you're on another planet most of the time, in a beautiful way. You're constantly teetering the line of somehow getting everything done at a very high standard, while making fun of everything at all times. Somehow everything becomes pink and fluffy and stupid.⁷ MC: Pink and fluffy and stupid…that is what my brain looks like. It's fluffy because there's a little bit of mold on it. It's a little rotted. There's a bit of brain rot going on. 7. For the record, KJ also describes Madelyn like this: 'She has such a lightness about her that makes coming to work so enjoyable, because you smile every time you look at her. I'm moody, but I can't not be in a good mood around her—it's infectious. It's really a blessing for me to be with people like her. It makes my job easier, it makes my life easier, and it makes my life more enjoyable.' MC: Let's say we're in a cartoon. And you know how in parts of a cartoon, they zoom into a person's brain and it's this physical space with little people inside? KJ has three of them, and they're all shooting BB guns at the walls. There's a thousand of these little BB guns just shooting around, pinging off the walls, and it's not stopping.⁸ KJ: Do I have ADHD? MC: Hmm, any more silly questions? KJ: Fuck off. Do you think I do? MC: KJ, we both do. KJ: I don't even know how we shot a movie together. And with Lasse! MC: I don't know how we finished any of our scenes. KJ: He was wandering around looking for seashells during filming. MC: One day, we did genuinely lose him. We couldn't find him for 30, 45 minutes. I think he was trying to get on the wrong train. He's wonderful. KJ: Really wonderful. I love him so much because although he's in his 70s, he still has all of his curiosity for life. I think that's why he cast us in the movie—he casts like-minded people.⁹ 8. Madelyn also has this to say about KJ: 'KJ is an open book. I really felt like we were a team on this one. He was my partner, and we were fully in it together.' 9. 'I think onscreen chemistry is really hard to replicate if it doesn't naturally exist,' Madelyn says about likeness and similarities. 'I mean, you can do what you can, but there's nothing quite like it.' KJ: I'm similar in that my relationship with my higher power is very strong,¹⁰ and I rely on it every day. I always turn back to, Okay, I'm not in control. Whatever's happening to me is happening to me for a reason bigger than I'll ever understand. In taking on this movie, I was coming out of a really, really dark point in my life, and the script was one of those scripts that kept following me around. I knew I had so much to learn from that character, especially where I was in my life in terms of control and acceptance at a time when I was like, 'I can't do this anymore. I have to put my hands up and ask God to help me.' I knew that this character could help me. That's just how God works in my life. I do think my character is more resilient than I am for sure. MC: I think you're a very resilient person. KJ: I appreciate it. I was nervous about this because I hadn't acted in a really long time and I hadn't worked since Riverdale. I was just coming out of a really difficult time, so I was like, Shit, do I still have it? But I did it. Something that I try to combat every day is this idea of self-worth. I think in our industry, as artists and as people who want to make a name for ourselves, a lot of self-worth is pulled from recognition of creation. You want to be recognized for what you've created, and you want people to see you. 10. KJ brought this part of his life to screen by playing a Christian singer/songwriter in 2020's I Still Believe, which recently hit Netflix. MC: That's actually something I was talking about the other day. Being an actor can be a bit of a mindfuck. People always say, 'Don't compare yourself to others' and 'Don't base your self-worth on things that you can't control.' But ultimately, we do base our self-worth on our work because that's our calling card, that's our paycheck. KJ: It's the currency of what we do. When I think about these things, it all comes down to the people you end up attracting in your life. Working on this movie and working with someone like Lasse, like Madelyn, it's a breath of fresh air to be like, Oh, I can put my ego away. There are certain people where your ego wants to jump out a little more and you feel like you have to be a little more defensive or protective, but there are certain people who make you feel at peace. I want to spend more time with people in my daily life who make me feel like that. KJ: You know what? That's why I love what I do, because I get to live it. I get to experience it through someone else and so it is my reality at some point. I'm not going to lie, I fell in love with Madelyn on this movie in many ways that, one, are part of my job, and two, happened because she's an amazing person. You lean into it because it's fucking fun, and it's life, and I like feeling great.¹¹ MC: Actually, this was a conversation KJ and I had pretty early on, about our own belief systems and how they tie into our characters. I want every project I do to be illuminating. It should feel like it's holding up a mirror to you, because then I get to learn and experience things outside of my life as Madelyn. Each filming experience is so wonderful and beautiful and holds its own memories. How lucky are we to be able to live these tiny little forevers? 11. Another reason KJ thrived in this role? His New Zealand accent: 'Playing Jack is the first time I'm using my natural accent, the first time in 10 years I've been able to live in the moment with another actor without feeling like I have a separation between me and the character with my voice, which is huge for me.' KJ: I know that no matter what happens, everything's going to be okay. If I believe that, then I'm not allowed to stress. I'm not allowed to worry. It actually takes such a load off me. That's what Jack taught me. MC: I have this thing where I love spontaneity, but sometimes I catch myself trying to control outcomes of a situation, outcomes of a feeling, or what I think I should be feeling. Heather taught me how to completely give permission. You know what I also learned on this project? MC: How to be a beast. MC: I highly recommend the friends-to-lovers pipeline. KJ: Don't be afraid to love somebody. If you love someone, fucking give it everything, just don't hold back. You live one time. You never know when that opportunity is going to happen again. MC: If you love someone, just say it. It shouldn't be this thing that is meant to be put into a case and opened up when you feel like it is the 'right' time. Love is something that just happens. It's nothing to be afraid of and you should express it. KJ: Life makes you practical and logical. Go back to your first instinct, man. It's to love. (Title Image) On Madelyn: Mugler blazer and pants, Tom Ford shirt, Hermès tie, Madelyn's own earring (worn throughout), Cartier ring. On KJ: Paul Smith blazer and pants, Carter Young shirt, Ray-Ban sunglasses, David Yurman jewelry. (Cover Image) On Madelyn: Khaite coat, t-shirt from The Society Archive, R13 shorts, Falke tights, Hermès boots, Bulgari necklace. On KJ: Loewe jacket and pants, t-shirt from The Society Archive, Frye boots, David Yurman jewelry. Styled by Brandon Tan. Hair by Ledora for R+Co. Makeup by Jennifer Tioseco for Revlon. Production by Deer Studio NYC. Shot on location at the TWA Hotel.
