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Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Actor' Costume Designer on Gemma Chan's Clown Costume and André Holland's James Dean-Inspired Red Jacket
When director Duke Johnson sat down and watched Federico Fellini's 1954 classic 'La Strada,' he was immediately drawn to the iconic clown costume worn by Giulietta Masina. Now in his newest film, 'The Actor,' a similar outfit is adorned by Edna (Gemma Chan) while out on an intimate date with Paul (André Holland). 'It's these two people that feel like maybe they don't fit into the world,' Johnson tells Variety. 'With these two oddballs finding each other, the possibility of connection was the driving force. They've really hit it off.' More from Variety 'The Actor' Director Duke Johnson on Embracing the Film's 'Theater Troupe Energy' and Why André Holland Is 'Such an Intuitive Actor' 'The Actor' Review: 'Anomalisa' Co-Director's Muddled Donald E. Westlake Adaptation Loses the Plot 'Love, Brooklyn' Review: André Holland, Nicole Beharie and DeWanda Wise Carry a Simmering Romantic Drama The moment takes place on Halloween night when Paul, still trying to piece together who he is after waking up with amnesia, goes out with Edna after the two meet at the cinema. Despite it being Halloween, you'd hardly be able to tell by looking at the men's synonymous coats, making Edna's hand-stitched blue clown costume immediately stand out. After Johnson pitched the idea, costume designer Suzie Harman ('The Death of Stalin,' 'The Personal History of David Copperfield') knew it was important for the design to look like something Edna herself had created. Harman collaborated closely with Chan to figure out how a 'sweet' person like Edna would make herself up, including the pink hat and red dots on her face. 'We didn't want it to look like it's come out of a couture house, instead something she would have made and hand-crafted,' Harman says. 'She's a crafty kind of character. For reference, we were looking at '50s patterns that our grandparents would have had.' While the film is steeped in old noir aesthetics, including trench jackets and a detective narrative, Harman was actually more inspired by the 'simplicity' of Japanese films from the '50s rather than Old Hollywood films. 'I mean yes, there were certainly references with the femme fatale, but it was more inspired by Ozu Yasujiro,' Harman says. 'Since noir was mostly black-and-white, we're actually injecting color into a noir-esque movie, so we had to be really strong with the palette.' In juxtaposition to Edna's blue clown costume, Paul wears a red-plaid jacket, one of the first visual choices Harman landed on. To make Paul's red pop even more, Harman, Johnson and the rest of the crew knew that red couldn't appear anywhere else in the film. 'It is a nod to 'On the Waterfront' and James Dean, and those iconic red jackets of the '50s,' Harman says. 'The question was then: When's he going to wear it? We wanted to bring in the soft turquoises and the cool raspberries with Edna because they would work really well with the red or whatever suit he was wearing in the scene. It all started with the red.' With 'The Actor' being an independently-produced project, an additional consideration for Harman and her team was making the most of a low budget. As Johnson previously told Variety, the decision to have the ensemble cast of Tracey Ullman, May Calamawy and Joe Cole play multiple parts came out of creative problem-solving. Harman admits that she got 'told off' for being too loud during the fittings with the actors because of how much fun they were having. 'It's only when the actor comes in that magic either happens, or you have to move in a different way,' Harman says. 'When actors come into a fitting, it's oftentimes their first point-of-contact. And sometimes it's one little fix, like for Tracey the glasses or the jewelry. But we had to move pretty fast with it. It was slightly bonkers.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Oscars 2026: First Blind Predictions Including Timothée Chalamet, Emma Stone, 'Wicked: For Good' and More What's Coming to Disney+ in March 2025
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Gemma Chan Gets Joni Mitchell's ‘Blue' More as She Gets Older
After captivating audiences as the glamorous Astrid in 'Crazy Rich Asians,' Gemma Chan was sent quite a few scripts with dignified but unhappy wives. She sensed trouble ahead. 'There's a danger of being typecast,' she said. 'But I'm still a work-in-progress pushing back on that. I want to do something different and show something different and tell a different story.' Her new film, 'The Actor,' directed by Duke Johnson, checked those boxes. Chan plays Edna, a costume designer in a factory town and the romantic interest of an amnesiac. She had loved Johnson's haunting animated movie 'Anomalisa,' and she responded similarly when she read 'The Actor.' 'Then I spoke to Duke about how he planned to shoot it, which was in quite a different way to anything that I've shot before,' she said. 'Quite experimental, bringing elements that were quite theatrical and quite stylized.' Chan has also wrapped 'Josephine,' with Channing Tatum, about an 8-year-old who witnesses an assault. And she is producing her own work: an adaptation of the 'Rise of the Empress' fantasy book series for Amazon Prime Video, and an unconventional history of Anna May Wong, considered to be the first Chinese American movie star. 'As an actor, you often come in quite late in the process and you are part of fulfilling someone else's vision,' she said. 'That's been really exciting, getting to choose where I want to put my focus.' In a video interview, Chan talked about becoming a cat lady, living on Mars and learning to play Schubert. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Having dim sum with my family has been a ritual since my childhood. There are certain restaurants that we go to time and again in Chinatown in London. The food is so delicious and in my relatively limited Cantonese, I can order all my favorites. There's often quite brisk service in these restaurants, but I wouldn't have it any other way. When I've been away for a long time, I really miss it. I miss the slightly grim sense of humor that Londoners have. The winters are bleak, quite diabolical, but when spring comes, it's a wonderful place to be. I was always a dog person and I never understood the appeal of cats. Then my boyfriend was doing a job in Puglia a few years ago, and he was staying in this farmhouse and there were stray cats all around. And this little kitten with a stumpy tail and a gorgeous personality wandered into his room and basically moved in there. We ended up adopting him and bringing him, sadly, from the beautiful Italian countryside to a flat in London. They come at it from a slightly skeptical point of view of 'Should we venture out into space? Should we settle the moon and Mars?' There's a lot of humor in the book, and they make the point that if you go out of the Earth's atmosphere, it's so hostile to life. It's made me appreciate so much that we are living in an Eden already. It's the classic British dinner or lunch. You have the potatoes, trimmings, the gravy, all of that is such comfort food and it's such a lovely meal to share. I love what we call a builder's tea. I use Yorkshire tea bags, which are very strong. You have to brew them properly and then not add too much milk. I feel like we drink tea with a real seriousness in the U.K., whether we're celebrating, commiserating or just trying to start the day. I've supported Arsenal for nearly all of my life, since I was 4. I try to go several times a year to Emirates Stadium. There's often moments of crushing disappointment that you become very familiar with. I shot 'Josephine' last year in San Francisco, and the place where I was staying had a Steinway piano. I started playing again for the first time in a long time. I listen to Brendel's recordings when I'm traveling or when I'm on the train or when I just need to clear my mind. I'd always wanted to try playing one of these pieces, so I've started learning No. 3. The colors, the costumes. You've got heartbreaking performances from Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Wong Kar-wai's skill in telling this story that could have been quite melodramatic, but he does it with such restraint that it's all the more moving. I didn't understand it as much when I first started listening to it in college. But as I get older, the lyrics to her songs resonate with me more deeply. Just these themes of love and loss that she speaks about through her music. I think 'A Case of You' is one of the most beautiful songs ever written.
Boston Globe
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
André Holland investigates identity in ‘The Actor'
The film, set in the 1950s, opens in Ohio where a New York theater actor, Paul Cole (Holland), is in bed with a married white woman and gets beaten senseless when her husband discovers them. Cole's long-term memory vanishes, and his short-term memory becomes erratic, leaving him to try to reconstruct himself and his life. But he's run out of town by the authorities for attempted adultery and only has enough bus fare to make it to a small town still far enough from New York. There, he lands a job at a tannery to earn money to make it home, and falls for a local costume designer (Gemma Chan). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Gemma Chan and André Holland in "The Actor." Neon Advertisement 'The story starts from the question of, who are we? Do we have control of the destiny of our personalities, and how much are we just the subject of our experiences and our memories, our wins and our failures?,' Johnson said. 'And can we change?' Holland says he's always believed in the human potential to change, but that memory plays a tricky role in shaping our present and our future. 'I find myself telling the same stories over and over, but they're always just a little bit different until I wonder what actually happened,' he said. In the movie, Paul's buddies and colleagues shrug off his womanizing and his cruel streak — in one scene, some pals laugh at the way he used to torment a homeless man — and Paul is confronted with the idea that he may be better off becoming a new person, Holland noted. 'He has an opportunity to piece together who he was, or live in the moment and build a new life.' Advertisement Johnson uses stylized musical cues and surrealistic directorial flourishes — such as the background disappearing when two characters are engrossed in conversation, and street scenes made to look like movie sets — to imbue the film with an obvious artifice and a dreaminess. He also cast supporting actors including Simon McBurney and Tracey Ullman in multiple roles. A scene from "The Actor," directed by Duke Johnson. Neon 'I love the theatrical qualities of filmmaking and think that, through metaphor, you get to something authentic,' Johnson said. Johnson is best known for his stop-motion animation work, like the Oscar-nominated 2015 film 'Anomalisa,' about a man who sees everyone around him as identical until he meets a woman who stands out. He co-directed with Charlie Kaufman. It was Kaufman who recommended 'Memory' to Johnson. Johnson loved how the book 'subverted the noir-thriller genre to excavate and explore the nature of identity,' he said, and set about figuring out how to translate its interior monologue into a film. (Kaufman serves as executive producer.) The director developed the script with Ryan Gosling, who was originally going to star. When he dropped out (remaining as another executive producer), the film company Neon suggested Holland. 'André has such access to his emotional experience,' Johnson said. 'He's one of those people where you look in their eyes and feel what they're feeling.' Holland was immediately intrigued by the project. 'When Duke described how he wanted a cast playing multiple parts, the theater nerd in me went crazy,' he recalled. 'And movies like this have always, to my knowledge, had [characters] played by white actors.' Advertisement The director and star discussed how much to change the film once it became a story about a Black man in trouble for being with a white woman in the Midwest in the 1950s. 'I wanted to honor the reality of the time period,' Holland said, 'and there's one version of this film where you could lean all the way into that, but we thought, 'What happens if we just gesture towards it so it leaves space for other things?'' Those 'other things' are what drew both men to the project. To prepare, Johnson steeped himself in philosophical questions, like how much of identity is rooted in memory and whether, as an individual, you 'are the thing that's reflected in the mirror, or the thing that's observing the reflection?' A scene from "The Actor," directed by Duke Johnson. Neon Once the story begins, he said, the larger ideas fade into the background, 'and it's about the emotional experience, and being connected to this character.' Making a low-budget film in Budapest with a lot of roles to fill, there was a practical reason to have the actors play multiple roles. 'But it also gives the audience an experience similar to Paul's where they wonder if they've seen that person before,' Johnson said. 'And this is about actors who become their characters, so you wonder: 'What is real?' and 'Who are we really?'" As Paul wanders through the haze and the maze caused by his amnesia, Johnson hopes it gets viewers thinking. But they shouldn't look to the film for all the answers. 'Hopefully it sparks thoughts that continue beyond the film,' he said, 'but we're all just asking questions, nobody has any answers.' Advertisement Stuart Miller can be reached at .
Los Angeles Times
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In the slender and lovely ‘The Actor,' an amnesiac clings to his identity
'The Actor' is an identity-crisis fable set sometime in post-WWII America, when jazz was still as raucous as music got. The year is hazy, the location is vague and the images are soft and fuzzy around the edges. Crisp details can't exist because our lead, Paul Cole (André Holland), has amnesia. A member of a traveling theater troupe, Paul has been abandoned in a small-town hospital after a cuckolded husband conked him on the head. At least, that's the story he's been told. The movie is as slim and ephemeral as Paul's reality. One thing that's sure is that Paul is from the first generation to grow up absorbed in screens. Film and TV are the framework these characters use to explain life, from the soap opera that assures its viewers that the show is a place 'where everyone knows their lines' to a maniac who suggests Paul be clobbered again because she once saw a movie in which that fixed a broken brain. In turn, the filmmaker Duke Johnson (who co-directed Charlie Kaufman's soul-wrenching stop-motion drama 'Anomalisa') uses art to explain his characters. Stranded somewhere in the Midwest with no family, friends or hobbies, Paul wanders into a movie theater that's playing a cartoon in which Casper the Friendly Ghost meanders to the moon. The implication is clear: Paul is a lost soul. 'The Actor,' co-written by Johnson and Stephen Cooney, is based on 'Memory,' a lost book by the prolific pulp novelist Donald E. Westlake, which was published only after the author's death in 2008. (Westlake is most famous for his Parker series that's been reworked to star everyone from Robert Duvall to Jason Statham, and he also wrote the script for the John Cusack and Annette Bening crime caper 'The Grifters.') Technically, the story is a mystery-thriller. Paul doesn't know who he was — or should be — and his quest to find out is beset by antagonists. A rural cop (Toby Jones) wants to arrest him for adultery. A loan shark (also Jones) demands a cut of his wages from a tannery where Paul's trying to earn bus fare to the Manhattan address on his driver's license. But really, the core struggle is Paul's inner conflict. He can't decide whether he should stay put in the embrace of a charming local kook, Edna (Gemma Chan), or head back to the city where he suspects he enjoyed a more glamorous life. Arcade Fire instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry's fantastic score translates his options into music: Homespun Americana is all passionate strings, while New York City is hard and fast percussion that keeps pace with the pitter-patter of Paul's racing heart. It's the sound of an approaching breakdown. The amnesia conceit allows the film to highlight its artificiality: painted backdrops, stages that recede into blackness, supporting players recast in multiple roles. (Stay for the end-credits reveal of which actor played what — the MVP is 71-year-old Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, who disappears into both male and female disguises.) Editor Garret Elkins is deft at disorientation. I loved a gag where Paul gets whacked from one side of the frame by a bird and from the other side by a duffel bag. Meanwhile, cinematographer Joe Passarelli moves the camera like it's playing catch-up, using pans to show us that Paul isn't aware of anything that's not right in front of his face. Hours, even weeks, race by in the seconds Holland takes to walk from one set to another; later, a shot of Halloween stars melts into an image of Christmas snow. Johnson has been trying to adapt 'Memory' for 10 years. But of all the amnesia tales in existence, I'm not sure why he wanted to make this one. He's uninterested in the book's driving point: Paul's struggle to make sense of a world where petty rules have supplanted community and common sense. Between the high cost of housing, the unhelpful unemployment offices and the cops finding excuses to harass him, Paul can't find his footing, let alone his way home. Over the course of the novel, he learns again and again that the system sets people up to fail. His memory lapse hasn't made folks meaner — it's just made Paul unaccustomed to the hassle. 'It's too absurd to be a tragedy,' Westlake's Paul sighs. 'This whole place is stupid.' Ultimately, that Paul realizes it doesn't matter who he is. The daily grind dehumanizes everyone. But Johnson has bent the novel inside out and turned it into, of all things, a romance. Beyond a vague hamlet-good, urban-bad critique — a sleight of hand in which the heartland folks win out over those rapacious city dwellers — he's less interested in the outside world than he is in Paul's own emotional landscape. Can a kinder society raise a man who deserves love? We get hints that Paul's previous self was a louse, but Holland's smile is so soft that it's hard to believe he was ever a nasty, selfish jerk. His version of the character can't even grow a personality. It's confounding that Johnson ignores the book's brutal existentialism. But it's equally fascinating that other parts of the story get their hooks in him. A novel — any piece of art, really — functions like a dream. You grab onto the bits that resonate. It's why people can leave the same movie with totally different interpretations. They might disagree, yet that doesn't make either of them wrong. Willfully obtuse, perhaps, but that applies more to bad-faith viewers trying to get their hot takes to go viral. Perhaps Johnson's own decade-long struggle to make 'The Actor,' only his second film, inspired him to dwell on the value Paul puts on being an artist. Actors are special, this Paul believes; he can hear it in a nurse's excited trill when she reveals to him his past job. 'I was — I am — an actor,' Paul tells Edna on their first date, even though he couldn't quote a line of Shakespeare. As a counterpoint, when Paul makes the same boast to the hiring manager at the local tannery, she circles 'unskilled labor.' Paul clings to his old status — it puffs him up. But I suspect that Johnson appreciates the gulf between the glamorous idea of working in the arts and the bitter reality of intermittent paychecks. And the type of acting Paul has done — stage shows, live soap operas — evaporates as soon as his work is over. Art is nowhere near as permanent as, say, the penny loafers Paul helps make at the factory. Art may not even be a sturdy enough foundation on which to build a life. Even though 'The Actor' sticks to the misty past, its anxieties are crystal clear in the present.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Neon's First Trailer for ‘The Actor' With André Holland and Gemma Chan Features an Amnesiac Love Story
'The Actor' is ready to wake up. The new movie, from 'Anomalisa' director Duke Johnson, stars André Holland and Gemma Chan, and you can watch the brand-new trailer right now. The official synopsis notes that the story follows 'Paul Cole (Holland) stranded in a mysterious small town with no memory of who he is or how he got here. Without a sense of identity or purpose, he starts from scratch and begins courting a local costume designer Edna (Chan). As bits and pieces of his past slowly emerge, he attempts to find his way home, but time is slippery, appearances can't be trusted and it's unclear which of his identities is real.' May Calamawy, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, Olwen Fouéré, Edward Hogg, Toby Jones, Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, Tracey Ullman and Scott Alexander Young also star. What's fascinating about 'The Actor' is that it is based on a Donald E. Westlake novel that the legendary mystery writer never published in his lifetime. It was written in 1963 and couldn't find a publisher, and was later shopped around in the late 1970s, by which point Westlake had deemed it too dated. After the writer died in 2008, a manuscript was discovered and published in 2010 by Hard Case Crime. And now that once lost story has become a major motion picture. Johnson, of course, directed the stop-motion 'Anomalisa' with Charlie Kaufman (who executive produced 'The Actor') and is making his live-action feature debut here. You definitely get a sense of the playfulness of animation in the trailer. Neon will release 'The Actor' exclusively in theaters on March 14. The post Neon's First Trailer for 'The Actor' With André Holland and Gemma Chan Features an Amnesiac Love Story appeared first on TheWrap.
