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Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Arcane' cocreator reflects on Season 2 and looks ahead to the future of ‘League of Legends'
Prior to 2021, Riot Games' League of Legends was primarily known as a wildly successful battle arena game. But the characters created for that game became even more popular after Netflix debuted the first season of Arcane, a thrilling animated series that rivaled Pixar in terms of visual flare. After a three-year hiatus, Arcane returned for its second and final season in November 2024. The series' swan song is now potentially a contender to win its second Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. Prior to the voting period, Gold Derby caught up with Christian Linke, the cocreator of Arcane and one of the primary driving voices behind it. Linke shared his thoughts on the origin of the show, Season 2's change in direction, and where the franchise may go in the future. More from GoldDerby 'Prizzi's Honor' at 40: How John and Angelica Huston made history together with his penultimate picture 'So indescribable and special': 'Happy's Place' stars Belissa Escobedo and Melissa Peterman on working with Reba McEntire Sam Rockwell on Frank's 'White Lotus' backstory, Woody Harrelson's influence, and going all in on 'this arc of Buddhist to Bad Lieutenant' Linke noted that most of the story and lore behind Arcane didn't exist before the show. All of that was built around asking questions about the characters as they appeared in the game. "What was there to start to work with was the characters, Vi, Jinx, Jayce, Viktor, Caitlyn, Ekko, That was really the heart of what inspired the show, and frankly made us fall in love with wanting to to work on this project because we had been with these characters for at that point, five or six years. We've been playing the game for hundreds or thousands of hours with these characters. And just over time, you start to have questions. 'Who are they when they're not just these game characters? How do they live their lives? What happened to these sisters that became enemies?' These were just all the questions that started to pop up over time. Jinx — as voiced by Fallout's Ella Purnell — turned out to be one of the show's most popular characters just as she is in the game. That didn't come as s surprise to Linke and his collaborators. "Jinx, to a large degree, inspired the entire show," said Linke. "I think there's always been something about Jinx that is magnetic. When she's on the screen, it's just fun. Her scenes are fun. She's always been one of the most successful characters from our game. So I think there's just something about that wild character and expression that is the ultimate power fantasy of doing whatever you want and being interesting and original. We've always known that Jinx is our powerhouse." However, Linke admitted to being shocked by how much viewers liked Jinx's second adoptive father, Silco (Jason Spisak), who was one of the unambiguously villainous characters in Season 1. "We weren't sure what kind of reaction to expect from Silco," admitted Linke. "He is a manipulative, criminal, ruthless, and at times violent man who does a lot of messed up stuff. I think we were pretty surprised to see how after the first season was out, there were a lot of Silco fans. I think that was a bit of a learning experience for us. It was fascinating to see how there were a lot of people who were willing to forgive a lot of pretty messed up stuff that he was doing as the underground kingpin of Zaun. I think that was perhaps the most interesting reaction we had to process." Netflix If the first season of Arcane was built around introducing the game's characters to a wider audience, Season 2 was meant to find new layers for the champions of the rival cities of Zaun and Piltover. "In many ways, Season 1 was all about getting the characters to that state that they're at in the game," said Linke. "When they're champions of League of Legends. Season 2 was about 'What have we not seen from these characters yet? What have we not seen in the game yet?' "We flipped a lot of the characters on their heads," continued Linke. "Caitlyn, for example, goes from a hopeful character who wants to work with the underground and really becomes an opponent and a very fierce aggressor after her traumatic experiences at the end of Season 1. And Jinx becomes this unlikely icon/hero of Zaun, which she really didn't expect. I think that was really fun to explore." Netflix The two seasons of Arcane were not only filled with emotional story arc, it also had some of the most jaw-dropping animation seen on TV or streaming that rivals Pixar itself. Linke gave full credit for Arcane's unique mixture of 3D and 2D animation to Fortiche, the French animation studio behind the show. "[Mixing 3D and 2D] was always their trademark look and I think it's because they had a lot of artists coming from comics and being in love with traditional 2D animation, 2D VFX," related Linke. "They just always wanted to find this approach that blends things together. It really was just leaning into that. They have this identity already as artists and it felt like it made 2D work on the big screen. It was a cool blend and I just always loved it. I tried to enable them to lean into that." Netflix According to Linke, Arcane was always going to run for only two seasons. But the League of Legends universe lives on. Regarding a potential live-action League of Legends, Linke said "there are explorations." He also said that the team has considered making an Arcane movie. "[Making an animated movie] has crossed our minds," admitted Linke. "We'll see. Now, we're exploring follow-up projects, and there are a bunch of features among them. Which ones will actually go? It's still a big TBD. In the last few weeks, when you have these screenings going on awards consideration, Arcane really holds up well on the big screen. That was a wonderful experience for us. Definitely everybody is excited to think about what future projects could look like on the big screen." For the present, Linke noted that Riot wants to keep the team behind Arcane intact as they decide what the next project will be. "What we're starting with is the people," said Linke. "We've worked together now for 10 years on Arcane. We're very inspired by Pixar, where people started working together on Toy Story, and then after that, people became captains of their own ships, because you learn from each other. That's where we're at. Right now, we want to invest in a few key people that worked on Arcane to explore new stories and see what they're drawn to. We still have to prove that we have strong stories and worthy stories to invest in. We're really investing in the talent that made Arcane. Best of GoldDerby Sam Rockwell on Frank's 'White Lotus' backstory, Woody Harrelson's influence, and going all in on 'this arc of Buddhist to Bad Lieutenant' Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh admit they 'never had the audacity to realize' a show like 'Deli Boys' was possible From 'Housewives' overload to the 'shadiest queens' alliance: The dish on 'The Traitors' Season 4 lineup Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sam Rockwell on Frank's ‘White Lotus' backstory, Woody Harrelson's influence, and going all in on ‘this arc of Buddhist to Bad Lieutenant'
Sam Rockwell's now-legendary monologue in The White Lotus almost sounded very different. As you may recall, Woody Harrelson was originally slated to play the role of Frank, the 10-month sober and celibate friend of Walton Goggins' Rick. Due to a scheduling shift, Harrelson dropped out and Rockwell stepped in. "With that monologue, there's many ways to go, and I think someone's tendency might be — or even my tendency was — to do a Southern accent. I guess because Woody was gonna do it, I had a kind of very sort of masculine Southern accent in my head," Rockwell tells Gold Derby. "So occasionally I would do that [while prepping]. And then I just realized that in order to really get to what was really great about that monologue, I had to get more of Sam in there." More from GoldDerby 'Prizzi's Honor' at 40: How John and Angelica Huston made history together with his penultimate picture 'So indescribable and special': 'Happy's Place' stars Belissa Escobedo and Melissa Peterman on working with Reba McEntire 'Arcane' cocreator reflects on Season 2 and looks ahead to the future of 'League of Legends' The simpler the better, he thought, because creator Mike White encapsulates the theme of Season 3 in those five minutes. "The conflict between the search for spirituality and selfishness, that's what most of the characters are struggling with," Rockwell says. "That's why it has to be uber, uber, uber honest and come from this place of gravitas." Should the Oscar winner take home his first Emmy, he'll have many reasons to thank his partner, Leslie Bibb. After White, who worked with Rockwell on 2009's Gentlemen Broncos and 2020's The One and Only Ivan, offered him the part, Bibb convinced him to take it. She'd already been cast as pseudo Real Housewife of Austin Kate, devoured the scripts, and knew how special the monologue was: "Really, this is what Mike is talking about: How we want to live our life, and the honesty with which we want to live our life, the vulnerability with which we want to live our life, and risking getting to know who we are, and is who I am in here different from who I am out here — that balance between spirit and form,' she told Gold Derby. Rockwell only hesitated because he was filming Gore Verbinski's Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, with its own 10-page monologue, and was afraid he wouldn't have enough prep time to do White's writing justice. He'd normally want four months to go through his process; he had something like six weeks, he recalls. Bibb visited him on location in South Africa, and while the two were on safari, they spent their afternoons between game drives drilling lines to get him off book. He half-joked with White that he might need a teleprompter or cue cards, and the White Lotus crew had an earwig prepared to assist him, but he didn't need it. He was able to film the length of the monologue in single takes. "What's great about Mike is he told me to slow down. I was doing it very fast, and he's not afraid of pauses and taking time," Rockwell says. He consulted with his longtime acting coach, Terry Knickerbocker, who helped him get to the heart of Frank. For the monologue, they discussed Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. "Because [Frank] is struggling with spirituality and selfishness, and the need for pleasure and this inward femininity, I really think the exterior needed to be very masculine to juxtapose that, for me to make it interesting," Rockwell says. It was implied in the script that Frank and Rick were ex-military. "Frank gives him a gun, we had a checkered past. Maybe we were mercenaries. We didn't want to get too specific about it, but I got a Navy SEAL tattoo that nobody would notice, the frog skeleton, and I got some scars to kind of rough up my exterior a little bit. I shaved my head," Rockwell says. SEE Leslie Bibb breaks down her aha moments filming The White Lotus: 'Kate suddenly got jealous' He drew from own past roles as well: "Choke [2008] was a movie I did that was about a sex addict, and that was good preparation for this monologue. And then I'd done stuff where I played an ex-Navy SEAL, so I'd already done that research. And then there was the Buddhism aspect, I just watched a couple of documentaries. And I did Drunks [1995] with Parker Posey, which was about Alcoholics Anonymous and NA. It's funny, it's like you play Laertes before you play Hamlet, you know, and there's an apprenticeship. So a lot of the parts that I've done, there were aspects of Frank in and it all came together." Knickerbocker suggested an idea that Rockwell ultimately pitched to White: That when Frank poses as Hollywood director Steve to aid Rick's revenge, it's almost a separate character to play. "That's why we had the Tony Scott sort of baseball cap, and the Members Only jacket, kind of what Frank's idea of a director might have been from the '80s or '90s." When Frank and Rick celebrate the latter's short-lived closure with a night on the town and return to the hotel with company, the scene was originally scripted as Frank just having sex, Rockwell shares. "I said, 'You know, we should really do this arc of Buddhist to Bad Lieutenant, and maybe I should be smoking crack. And there should be something kind of dangerous, like a knife or something. And we had some nunchucks — I mean, that got a little silly. So we had the crack pipe, and the girls were there hanging out, and I just said, 'Let's do this [bit showing them my knife skills].' I'd done this movie Mr. Wright [2015] where I learned some of this knife stuff. … It was a way to show his nuttiness." As for the hilarious roll Rockwell performs when Frank chases a departing Rick down the hallway, the actor says that probably came from his fight training for 2024's Argylle. "That was a bad roll. That was a terrible role. I would hope I could do a better role than that, but he's sort of still drunk," he explains, laughing as he remembers that he took pictures off the wall in some takes. The animal-print briefs he was wearing were "an homage to Ray Liotta in Something Wild, or maybe Richard Gere in American Gigolo, an homage to those kind of dangerous archetypes, Tom Berenger in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.' There could have been even more action in Frank's arc, it turns out. "We had a bar fight that we shot that was cut," Rockwell reveals. "It was a bar fight where I defend this transgender waitress from these Russian guys." All in all, he spent about two and a half weeks on the show, filming his scenes as director Steve to get his sea legs before tackling the monologue opposite Goggins, whose reaction shots are priceless. Those two have been good friends for 15 years, since meeting on 2011's Cowboys & Aliens. 'I don't know if I've ever had that experience, acting with a close friend playing close friends," Rockwell says. "I had an instinct that we would have this kind of Butch-Sundance thing going. You know this Cagney-and-Lacey kind of thing. I think Walt did, too, and Leslie did. I knew we'd have a shorthand, and we could make each other laugh. … Walt and I come from a similar background. We're both latchkey kids, [raised by] single parents, and we both performed with our mothers when we were very young. He did clogging contests with his mother, which is kind of Southern tap-dancing, and I did a play with my mom when I was 10. I'm a city kid, he's a country kid, but we definitely identify. We've worked in restaurants, and we've been broke, me and Walt. So we have a lot in common." It's difficult to imagine another actor playing Frank — even Harrelson has said he wouldn't have done as fantastic a job as Rockwell did. "I think he would have been amazing. I'd love to have seen Woody's version of Frank," Rockwell says of his costar from 2012's Seven Psychopaths and 2012's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. "I couldn't stop thinking about him, actually, while I was doing it. It definitely influenced my interpretation." To date, he hasn't heard Harrelson's review in person. "I haven't seen him in a while. I'm sure he'll have something to say. He'll make some joke," Rockwell says with a grin. "He's one of my favorite people. He's one of the funniest people I know. He's mischievous. I love Woody. So we'll talk about it at some point, and he'll say something really witty, I'm sure." Best of GoldDerby Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh admit they 'never had the audacity to realize' a show like 'Deli Boys' was possible From 'Housewives' overload to the 'shadiest queens' alliance: The dish on 'The Traitors' Season 4 lineup Leslie Bibb breaks down her aha moments filming 'The White Lotus': 'Kate suddenly got jealous' Click here to read the full article.
