Empire UK - April 2023

PASCAL, KATEE SACKHOFF AND MORE TELL US, SEASON 3 HAS PUSHED THEM FURTHER THAN EVER… APRIL 2023 51

EDRO PASCAL CLIMBS into his Beskar armour, dons his helmet and strides into darkness. There he awaits a flickering of light to reveal which fantastical planet he’ll be transported to. Having been led through “an anonymous, sterile parking lot into anonymous, sterile hallways”, he suddenly finds himself… well, anywhere. Every day on the set of The Mandalorian Season 3 is transformative. One minute you’re in your trailer, “doom-scrolling, listening to NPR [National Public Radio] and the news and dissociating,” Pascal tells Empire. The next, you’re walking through the bustling capital of the volcanic planet Nevarro, thanks to the groundbreaking visual-effects technology of the Volume. “It’s almost like going into Space Mountain,” he says with childlike wonder. “This perpetually dark studio that gets lit up by snow-capped planets.” This LED immersive soundstage presents vibrant backdrops, landscapes and locations for cast and crew to interact with in real-time, in just one studio. In a corner, VFX engineers huddle at computer monitors. Pascal affectionately calls them “NASA”, because they have the artistry and technical know-how to launch the actors into hyperspace and realise the expansive vision of the show. Yet, the world-building goes beyond computer graphics; the rich practical texture of caves, massive city sets and intricate starships are built in the centre of the Volume, seamlessly connecting to the virtual world. “It’s experiential,” says Carl Weathers, who returns both as bounty hunter-turnedmagistrate Greef Karga, and director of one episode in this new season. “You don’t need to imagine anything. You actually experience what the audience is going to see,” he adds, recalling the moment in Season 1 when he — or at least Greef — was standing on a boat on a river of lava. “All of the lava looked real. I remember [director] Deborah Chow saying, ‘Cut,’ and all of the technology stopped. I grabbed the side of the boat because it felt like I was going to fall over — that’s what it does to your senses.” And it was sick bags at the ready for Katee Sackhoff, who plays regal Mandalorian ruler Bo-Katan Kryze. “To be standing on the Razor Crest [spaceship] and getting nauseous, you’re getting seasick, it’s such a weird experience because you’re literally there.” Tatooine is an outlier, found on a practical set next to an LA freeway. A delicate marriage of physical elements and post-production VFX brings the swarming desert planet to life. “Once you step onto a set like that, you are in the real Tatooine,” says Pascal. “The detail is astonishing.” The end result of those sets and the Volume and everything that comes later always amazes him. “To witness that process in such early stages,” he says, “it’s fascinating. You always get a real sense of what it’s going to look like and you’re always like, ‘Holy shit. This is going to blow people away.’” And it does. Ever since The Mandalorian, from series creator Jon Favreau and executive producer Dave Filoni, first aired on Disney+ in 2020, it’s given Star Wars a new lease of life. Critics and audiences have been left slack-jawed by the American Western-tinged, Japanese Chanbara-infused series, thanks to its canny ability to balance the Skywalker legacy with fresh narratives. For two acclaimed seasons, and spin-off series The Book Of Boba Fett, viewers have devoured the exploits of Pascal’s Din Djarin and Grogu, the eponymous gun-for-hire and his Force-powered ward, as they fend off bounty hunters, beasts and nefarious Imperial villains. “It’s such a phenomenal experience,” says Sackhoff, who voiced Bo-Katan in Filoni’s animated series The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels before reprising the character in live-action for The Mandalorian Season 2. “Especially growing up a fan of Star Wars. I used to joke when I moved to California and started acting. I’d say, ‘If George Lucas calls and they’re casting a rock, I will pay them to do it.’ So to see it come to life with my own two eyes and feel like I’m in that world, it’s the craziest thing ever.” Buckle up: it’s time to engage thrusters and blast off to a soundstage far, far away (well, Manhattan Beach Studios) as we count the ways of The Mandalorian and talk to the cast about the show’s unique set of challenges — and thrills. Hold on to your macarons. eing coated in metal can test one’s mettle. Imbuing armoured characters with reality is easier said than done when you rarely see their faces. “The story of family — and chosen family, and multi-creature 52 APRIL 2023

connection — is at the centre of all of this adventure,” says Pascal, who for the vast majority of the time is hidden behind a helmet. “To find the notes to play that with a word, with a tilt of the head… it’s shockingly challenging.” Especially when your vision is impaired. “When it’s on, you immediately feel powerful, protected, dangerous, and like a protector,” he says of his armour. Yet trying to walk around is a whole different ball game. “It’s like putting on a head-to-toe glove with weights on it. It’s ironic that you can’t see any facial expression because it puts you in the world so completely, and instantly makes the character feel real — but you can’t see shit!” he laughs. “They’ve continued to finesse and make it more comfortable, but it’s like going blind. Your breath completely fogs up the narrow slit that you can see through. Clockwise from main: Katee Sackhoff suited up as Bo-Katan Kryze; Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris) and Grogu; Bo-Katan unmasked; TOO CUTE. ❯ APRIL 2023 53

There’s no peripheral vision. If there’s a hole, I’m gonna fall into it.” Emily Swallow plays The Armorer, forging weaponry (and, well, armour) for Mandalorians in her Nevarro enclave. When Swallow first saw her outfit, she found it breathtaking, but, like Pascal, the reality of moving about in something with “totally limited vision” has been complex. Her biggest struggle as she got to grips with it was holding her tools. “Having these gloves that Jon [Favreau] called my ‘oven mitts’ because they were huge and very clumsy, and knowing that I was supposed to be a skilled artisan, this skilled warrior, but feeling very awkward… it was such a study in contrasts,” she says. “I had to summon every ounce of confidence that I could pretend to have, to trust that it looked the way I wanted it to look, and hoped that it didn’t look as awkward as it felt.” It’s got better, she says. She’s in the armour a lot more for Season 3, and as such, it’s been tailored more precisely. “The craftsmanship of all the tools that they’ve made for her is absolutely exquisite, and I’d be trying to pick things up and I would drop them,” she laments of previous seasons. “So I asked, ‘Could I maybe have some gloves that fit a little bit better?’ They gave me my wish. I have new gloves for Season 3.” It helps, of course, that there are numerous stunt performers on the show, with various different disciplines, all adept at climbing into that armour with flexibility. “It takes a village,” says Pascal of Din Djarin’s on-screen antics. Five women donned Bo-Katan’s warrior armour throughout Season 3. “If one person has a better skill-set than the other, well, that person needs to put the suit on that day,” says Sackhoff. “That being said, I have a wicked knee-slide. I’ve been practising my knee-slides on my mum’s kitchen with dish rags since I was five years old, so when that knee-slide comes up, you’ll know: that’s me. There are holes in my suit because I had to do that so many times. I came home with so many bruises on my knees. But I love that. If I came home with bruises, it was a good day!” The physical work, though, is just one piece of the The Mandalorian’s puzzle. The dialogue can be just as difficult to master. or Swallow, tackling the scripts like she would a Shakespeare play gave her a greater handle on the exposition she’s often tasked with. There is history and heritage and portent in The Armorer’s dispatches — she’s not one for a spot of light conversation. “It’s a process,” says Swallow, explaining how her theatrical training equips her for space adventures. “What’s going to make it alive, and pertinent? Even though The Armorer is talking about the songs of eons past, ‘long ago and far away’, it’s always vital to whatever they’re going through in that moment.” Besides, they can always change dialogue in post-production — having to match mouth movements, she says, is no problem for characters wearing helmets. Amy Sedaris, who plays wisecracking, big-haired mechanic Peli Motto, finds the jargonheavy scripts tricky. Favreau wrote the role for her — the two have been friends for decades, having trained together in Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe in the late 1980s — but that doesn’t guarantee the rhythms come naturally. “Memorising the lines is the hard part for me because I don’t understand what I’m saying,” she says. “David [Filoni] and Favreau will explain it to me, but that doesn’t really help because I just don’t get it.” The nuances of space mechanics don’t come easy. Sedaris became best friends with Pascal instantly, she says, bonding over the vocal challenges. “We would make each other laugh because we would finally get through this monologue and then just crack up because we can’t even believe that we had to say it.” It’s understandable — especially when her directors surprise her with intergalactic curveballs. “Favreau will always throw something at me,” she says, “like I have to speak ‘Frog’. And I’m like, ‘What does a frog sound like?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t know,’ and he’ll walk away. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ That happens to me every season. Like the Jawas, I have to start speaking to them. But that’s what makes it fun.” As time has gone on, though, returning cast-members have become more comfortable with their characters. At this point in the Mandalorian journey, they can understand their motivations, personalities and emotions richly. “I’ve lived in this woman’s skin for a long time now,” says Sackhoff of Bo-Katan. “One of the things that Jon and I focus on is where she is in the moment, what peppers her experience. Jon and [director/executive producer] Rick [Famuyiwa], every single day, defer to me, which is a really crazy experience, to have these masters asking me what I feel. It respects the craft, and the years that I have put in. I really do know her — her pain is my pain. When she experiences something, I really feel it.” There’s room for flexibility throughout. As Peli, Sedaris brings welcome comic relief for a sometimes solemn on-screen world, and that remit has given her greater creative freedom. Remember that bit in The Book Of Boba Fett where she spits out her tooth? “I just improvised that,” she says. “I asked everybody on the set if they had a Tic Tac, and somebody had some mints. I did it just to make the director laugh. I didn’t think they’d keep it.” Yet, she says, there are limits. “It’s got to be true to the Star Wars thing. Somebody might say, ‘Oh, they wouldn’t say that in space,’ so it’s funny to know the boundaries. I love it. To work with a big ant. Or to work on spaceships. It’s insane.” 54 APRIL 2023

e’re three seasons in now. The Mandalorian has been a pop-culture behemoth from the start, but fans have become increasingly rabid — and the cast are easy targets. “At conventions, people are so angry with me, asking, ‘Why did you do that to Mando? Why did you kick him out?’” says Swallow of the upset over The Armorer’s recent declaration that Din is a Mandalorian no more. Sedaris, meanwhile, is sanguine about polarising people. “You either like Peli or you don’t, meaning you like me or you don’t. But it doesn’t bother me if somebody doesn’t, because diehard fans have got this thing in their head. If somebody has something negative to say about me, it just makes me laugh.” Just wait until fans find out what Swallow would do if she had the keys to the kingdom. There’s a fair amount of downtime on set, when actors need to occupy themselves while the tech is being prepared — and on Season 3, Swallow has used that time wisely. “I came up with a lot of different spin-offs,” she says. “I have a whole slate of reality programming for the Mandalorians. It includes ‘The Bachelorlorian’, which is a Mandalorian dating show. And ‘Pimp My Ship’, which is like Pimp My Ride, and that’s hosted by Peli Motto. Then we have ‘Intergalactic Singing Idol’, which is a cross between American Idol and The Masked Singer, because it’s Mandalorians.” By all accounts, though, keeping things fresh this far into a show is easier when the scripts, as the cast tell us, make it so much more expansive. “What I love most about Season 3 is how much the world opens up in terms of Mandalore and Mandalorians,” says Pascal. “That means so many different facets of culture, politics, and rules and discoveries. Delicious doors are flying wide open.” Sackhoff was awestruck when she read the screenplays. “[I was] texting Jon and Dave, ‘Are you serious?’ This is an epic season — it’s so big and so bold and so different,” she says. Bo-Katan is now faced with an emotional conflict, concerning familial legacy, political responsibility and, says Sackhoff, redemption. “We know the family that she was born into; now what’s the family that she’s going to choose? What does that look like?” The grey areas are what makes this show tick. The Mandalorian’s writers get into the complicated crevices of human nature via characters who often use iffy moral compasses to navigate troubled times. Greef fits this bill to a T, and Weathers relishes the deeper exploration. “You’re not quite sure if he’s being honest, or manipulative, or if he is ultimately just a great leader. The magistrate has really upped his game,” he says of Season 3. “Nevarro has grown under the guidance and the auspices of Greef Karga. It’s flourishing, but there are still nefarious entities at work, and so there’s gonna be a lot of shenanigans going on.” We wouldn’t want it any other way. The show’s popularity is no surprise: it’s a gnarly, action-packed drama that transports viewers to a very cool part of the Star Wars galaxy. Where the atmosphere is thick with intrigue and tension, and violence is only a hair’s breadth away. A lawless world filled with complicated individuals who toe the grey space between good and bad, light and dark. This is the way. THE MANDALORIAN SEASON 3 IS ON DISNEY+ FROM 1 MARCH Top to bottom: Din takes centre stage; Emily Swallow as The Armorer, not fond of Mandalorians removing their helmets; Carl Weathers returns as Greef Karga, “kind of godfather to Grogu”. Top to bottom: Din, aka the Mandalorian, ready to put the pedal to the metal; Jedi swing their ’sabers; TOO CUTE. APRIL 2023 55

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NO MATTER WHAT YOU CALL HIM — GROGU, T H E C H I L D , O R S I M P LY B A BY YO DA — H E ’ S T H E M A N D A L O R I A N ’ S B I G G E S T B R E A K - O U T S TA R . T H E C R E AT I V E S B E H I N D T H E B E L O V E D SCENE-STEALER TALK HIS JOURNEY TO THE SCREEN — AND INTO EVERYONE’S HEARTS WORDS BEN TRAVIS APRIL 2023 57 The galaxy’s greenest, grooviest rock star — concept art of Grogu created for Season 3 of The Mandalorian, with Din Djarin in the background.

John Rosengrant (founder, Legacy Effects): I had a meeting with Jon and [producer] Colin Wilson. I went into this room set up with production art all over the walls, and I saw these illustrations of — as the world calls him — Baby Yoda. I’m asking, “What is this?” Pedro Pascal (Din Djarin): Gizmo [from Gremlins] was a huge part of my childhood, so there was already this nostalgic tingle in seeing the first illustrations of Grogu. Famuyiwa: Jon took me through the ideas and the influences — the spaghetti Western stuff, how it would be in the spirit of Lone Wolf And Cub or Paper Moon. That was the introduction. It was being specific about this relationship with Mando and this baby, and how, at a certain point in his life, it gets affected by the influence of this child. It was music to my ears. T H E C R E AT I O N Work then begins on taking Favreau’s sketches — and Doug Chiang and Christian Alzmann’s concept art — and turning it into something three-dimensional and adorable… Famuyiwa: My question to Jon was, “How is this going to be brought to life? Will it be CG? Puppets? Both?” He talked about the history of puppetry on [Star Wars] and wanting to honour that. This puppet was going to be the foundation of it. Rosengrant: Jon wanted Christian’s artwork to be our departure point. It was, “Don’t make him too cute, because he’ll be [cute] through his actions.” We needed to find that balance of ‘cute-ugliness’ — not spot-on puppy cute, just a little bit off. He’d become endearing through his character. Scott Patton [digital designer at Legacy] is a ZBrush digital sculptor, and started working out [how to] translate it from 2D into 3D. TaMara Carlson Woodard (creature-effects artist, puppeteer, specialty costumer): When Scott and I got the brief, I was given a picture of Grogu without any clothes on — they were still trying to decide what he really looked like, what size he would be. I built a little body based off what I would want to hold, a little stuffed-animal version without a face — I called it ‘Yermit’, because it wasn’t Yoda, and it wasn’t Kermit. Rosengrant: I 3D-printed three slightly different heads and brought those to Jon. Pete Clarke [engineer] started working on the mechanics simultaneously with us refining the THE CONCEPTION As Disney seeks a Star Wars series for its impending streaming service, veteran director Jon Favreau teams up with The Clone Wars alumnus Dave Filoni — pitching the story of a Mandalorian warrior and his unexpected young charge… Dave Filoni (creator/executive producer): I was probably one of the first people to hear that pitch. Jon said, “I want to make a character that’s like a baby Yoda.” I thought, “Where are we going with this? If we’re doing that, I want to help, because Yoda is such an important character to George [Lucas]. I want to help make sure it’s going to come across as well as it can.” Jon Favreau (creator/executive producer): We knew it wasn’t Yoda — anybody who knows the timeframe [five years after Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi] knows that it can’t be him. Is it a clone? There’s a lot of cloning going on. But he’s his own person, with his own history. Rick Famuyiwa (director/writer on Season 1 and 2; executive producer on Season 3): Jon and Dave showed me the first sketch that inspired it — that last image [in ‘Chapter 1: The Mandalorian’] of Mando and the baby as he’s in his pram, and he reaches down into it. 58 APRIL 2023

skin. [Sculptor] Glen Hanz did a clay press from Scott’s ZBrush and started fine-detailing it, putting in all the pores. We pre-coloured the inner ears to get the skin-translucency right, so once we back-lit those, you see that glow through there. Carlson Woodard: I built the costume — we knew it should have clothes, but we didn’t know anything about its origin. So we said, “Okay, somebody found this [baby], and it needs clothes… I’m going to take something that was worn by a larger human.” I deconstructed it and then reassembled it for this smaller creature. Some pieces are structural, and a lot of pieces are hand-sewn and raggedy. Rosengrant: It took several months to make [the puppet] — I want to say four. That’s all the time I had. We had it done maybe a week before it was going to shoot — we punched in all the little hairs individually, and [key artist] Ryan Pintar painted it. It really came to life. Famuyiwa: When I saw what Legacy built, what was surprising was how emotive it was gonna be. I didn’t know how much would get overwritten with CG — but even in the early tests, it was clear that the performance aspect from the puppet itself was going to be very important. Rosengrant: That test showed a little spark to everybody that this thing could be maybe more than just a CG-reference or one- or two-shot little animatronic puppet. THE PHENOMENON As shooting begins, the animatronic Grogu arrives on set — and remains a tightly kept secret, held right until the day the first instalment hits Disney+… Famuyiwa: The puppet itself was a character coming to life. I made the decision to talk to the puppeteers in the same way I’d be talking to an actor, and talk about where the character is at the moment. I started treating Grogu as just another member of the cast. Rosengrant: We all fell in love with him, and we thought he was cute. We did not have any idea how the world [would react]. Filoni: I didn’t know it would be this thing. The person that always seemed to know was Werner Herzog [who played The Client]. He clocked it right at the start. Rosengrant: He really fell in love with it. It was quite amazing. Having this little character there reacting and blinking helped him, and he really did sing its praises. He was worried that it was brain-dead at one point — the AD said, “Go ahead and shut it off, he’s off-camera as eyelines for Werner.” Werner got very concerned. He goes [panicked Werner Herzog impression], “I think it’s brain-dead, what’s wrong with it?” And it’s like, “No, no, no, hold on!” We fired it up again. Pascal: It’s fascinating to see other people meet Grogu for the first time and be so completely disarmed in the way that audiences are. Rather than the magic disappearing because you’re with a puppet, you’re reduced to being a little kid ❯ Far left: Hitching a lift in Season 2. Left: The face that stole a gazillion hearts. Below: The cup that cheers — even when you’re a toddler. APRIL 2023 59 Left, main: Anything E.T. can do... Grogu and Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) bond. Inset: The pencil sketch by co-creator Dave Filoni that encapsulated the initial idea for the show.

that we knew we could name him. It was a fun opportunity to add more dimension and history to the character, having somebody Forcesensitive actually read [the name] from him — and also explaining why he was able to do what he did, and making sure that the rules around the Force were consistent with what George had originally conceived. Famuyiwa: Jon said that he was gonna name him, and I was like, “Alright, what’s the name?” He said, “Grogu.” And I was like [tentatively] “Okay...” It didn’t quite roll off the tongue — it wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. I’m not even quite sure where it came from! I still don’t know. At the time, I was like, “It’s different!” That’s the way you could say it without saying it. But after a while, it grew on me. Rosengrant: I think people were a little bit like, “Oh my God, that’s its name?” You’re not quite sure what the reaction is. When [Mando] meets up with Peli Motto [Amy Sedaris], she makes a funny thing of, you know, “Grogu? What kind of name is that?” So I think the selfawareness helps. I mean, the world still calls him Baby Yoda! Famuyiwa: I still say ‘Baby Yoda’. I say ‘Baby G’ now — that’s what I call him. [Laughs] THE FAREWELL In the closing episodes of Season 2, Grogu is kidnapped by Moff Gideon [Giancarlo Esposito]. And when Din Djarin rescues him, he makes the tough decision to hand the baby over to Jedi Master Luke Skywalker — but not before breaking the cardinal Mandalorian rule and removing his helmet… Famuyiwa: My first episode [‘Chapter 2: The Child’] was very much about Grogu, and the purity of that relationship. In [‘Chapter 15: The Believer’], even though there was an absence of Grogu physically, he was still top of everyone’s mind. Everything in that episode was the repercussions of Grogu getting taken, and what he’d be willing to do to get The Child back safely. Ultimately, it was about [Din’s] decision that he had to make about revealing his face. Pascal: You’d think that [Din taking the mask off ] would just be an impossible thing to compose emotionally, and yet it was the opposite. So much of Grogu as a character happens in the moment, with the animatronic puppeteers being able to see what you’re doing and essentially reacting to it. It felt like a real scene. You’d think you would have this empty feeling when this thing is staring back meeting their little imaginary friend. Rosengrant: His introduction was genius. Jon wanted to keep it a secret, and he got the desired effect — everyone lost their mind after that episode. It’s so unexpected. It’s not what [viewers] anticipated or wanted. They missed out on Christmas [toys], except for probably T-shirts or towels that they could print quickly, but I think [the surprise is] what made him as endearing and famous as he became. Famuyiwa: I remember looking on Amazon and we saw the knock-off things, and we were like, “Should we get this? No, it’s not really official...” THE NAME Going into Season 2, the little green guy had become a global icon. The problem was, nobody knew exactly what to call him… Famuyiwa: Once people started calling it Baby Yoda, [his popularity] went to another stratosphere. Favreau: It was one thing for us to hold back all the merchandise until the surprise was out, but then it’s like, “Okay, what’s his name?” We said, “Let’s refer to him as ‘The Child’.” That became a bit of a game. So we knew we needed something. It wasn’t until Ahsoka popped up [in Season 2] 60 APRIL 2023

at you, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt anchored in something real — even though it’s literally not real. Carlson Woodard: When he passes Grogu to Luke, I was down on the ground holding his umbilical cord — the hero puppet has a big servo pack [which controls motion] and a tether, so somebody has to be holding that if he’s moving. For the hand-off, I was down on the ground scooching on my knees. They were keeping that a secret from everybody. As I was down there holding that pack, I was taking it all in and putting some pieces together: “Oh! This is interesting…” It was special and emotional for a lot of different reasons. THE REUNION Grogu’s story continues in The Book Of Boba Fett — receiving some Jedi training from Luke, before choosing to return to The Mandalorian’s side. The pair are reunited amid a frantic battle on Tattooine… Rosengrant: In Season 2, Grogu starts doing more. In The Book Of Boba Fett, it went crazy — he starts doing lots of things. On Season 2, it was helpful to have a self-contained [puppet], which no longer had cables on it. It became known as the ‘hands-free’. We ended up building one [on Boba Fett] that was floppy — almost a rag-doll with an attachment at its mid-centre of gravity, so that we could flip it around [in his Jedi training]. Favreau: The Force gives you some natural abilities as far as what your potential is, but without mentorship and training, you can’t unlock all of those things. It’s not just a metaphor for a magical ability that has been visited upon you; it speaks to potential. It’s how you can apply yourself — who you study with, what you do, how hard you work — that can lead to different outcomes. Rosengrant: When he’s with Luke, and he has to make a decision over whether he’s going to be a friend or if he’s going to become a little Jedi, that was such an emotional moment. It was a lot of nuances in the puppeteering, truly a little performance. People on the crew actually lost track that it was a puppet — a couple of times we got a round of applause, because everybody got sucked into the world, that this little character was truly there. Pascal: What was so clever was that Mando and Grogu were physically reunited [in the finale] in a moment of such adventure and action. The word for it in Spanish is “prisa” — there isn’t much time [for the reunion], and there was just so much going on in that moment that it was impossible to stop and be precious, but it still felt precious. It was part of this really incredible climax of action. THE FUTURE In Season 3, Grogu is back in the care of Din Djarin. Cue a fresh set of intergalactic surrogate-father adventures… Rosengrant: What’s amazing about Grogu is, he’s touched everybody’s heart. For me, having done so many infamous villains throughout the years — The Terminator, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, the Alien Queen — it’s nice to do one that’s so beloved and sweet. Famuyiwa: The purity of the character brings out the best in the people around him. This next season continues to attach to that idea. Din Djarin is having to face the decision to take off his helmet because of this child. How he can put himself right with his own beliefs — and how to then look forward — is a lot of what this season is about. Carlson Woodard: My favourite Grogu moment is actually coming up in Season 3 — so I can’t talk about it yet. Rosengrant: I’ll be killed [if I talk about Grogu in Season 3]! I won’t exist anymore if I do that! Famuyiwa: There will be things [in Season 3] that once again have people talking about Grogu. In incremental ways, he’s growing as a character and in this partnership with Mando. As this relationship grows, Grogu has to become more central in things that are going on. He’s now firmly at the hip of Mando in every adventure... But he’s still just a baby! Left: Din Djarin/ Mando breaks the Mandalorian rule re helmets. Below: Grogu in 2022’s The Book Of Boba Fett. APRIL 2023 61 Main: Child prodigy: utilising the Force. Inset: Night-time chats — well, cooing — with Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) in Season 2.

WITH THE MANDALORIAN, DAVE FILONI AND JON FAVREAU REINVENTED S TA R W A R S A N D R E V O L U T I O N I S E D T E L E V I S I O N . W E G O T T H E M T O G E T H E R O N S E T T O T E L L US HOW THEY’VE MADE THE SMALL SCREEN SO BIG WORDS CHRIS HEWITT • PORTRAITS DYLAN COULTER 62 APRIL 2023

Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau, photographed exclusively for Empire at Manhattan Beach Studios, Los Angeles, on 1 December 2022. APRIL 2023 63

Pretty much every day, in fact. And by and large, when they do they only have one thing on their minds: Star Wars. Specifically, the corner of the Star Wars universe that has become their domain since they combined forces in 2019 to launch The Mandalorian. Since then, the cultural impact of Mando, Baby Yoda/The Child/ Grogu/Whatever You Want To Call Him, and the rest has meant that Favreau — the film director-turned-showrunner, who writes virtually every episode of The Mandalorian — and Filoni — Lucasfilm’s animation ambassador, creator of the Clone Wars and Rebels TV shows and characters like Ahsoka Tano, Cad Bane and Bo-Katan Kryze, who have all made the leap to live-action — now have an expanded portfolio of shows to supervise. This includes The Book Of Boba Fett, the upcoming Ahsoka (starring Rosario Dawson as Filoni’s most-lauded character, Anakin Skywalker’s former apprentice), and Jon Watts’ Skeleton Crew. The Mandalorian, though, is still their main focus. Season 2 ended with the emotional gut-punch of surrogate father-son Mando and Grogu parting ways, a blow eased somewhat by a cameo appearance from a young Luke Skywalker, who showed up at the end to kick all kinds of Imperial ass and take Grogu for Jedi training. Besides, the separation was almost immediately reversed in 2021’s The Book Of Boba Fett, in which Grogu turned his back on the teachings of the Jedi to gambol giddily around the galaxy with his be-helmeted dad. Empire caught up with them recently, and can confirm that Favreau and Dave Filoni not only talk a lot — they talk a lot. It’s been two years since the last season of The Mandalorian. What did that break mean for you, and how you approached Season 3? Favreau: I don’t know that it really feels like a break. It doesn’t feel like I’ve set this story down. I think that what happened in The Book Of Boba Fett, with the two characters [Mando and Grogu] being reunited, helped set the table for this season. In that way, I think that was very helpful, because the core relationship in the show is that central relationship, and the end of Season 2 left us in a very different place. So the time passage allowed us to bring the characters back together in a way that was organic to the situation. Filoni: Star Wars, I think of as one big, expansive galaxy and timeframe. So we’re able to look at things across a very broad spectrum. The time in-between, it wasn’t time spent away because we were making Boba Fett, and that story was affecting the stories we were telling in Mandalorian. It’s just one big, long timeline that we keep exploring different areas of. The end of Season 2 could have been the end of The Mandalorian. Was that something you considered, with Grogu going off with Luke? Favreau: We knew certain things had to happen. Who he would meet... There was a sense of discovery of who that was. It wasn’t like we said from the jump that this was a story about a little Force-sensitive creature meeting up with Luke Skywalker. That wasn’t the plan. That emerged as things unfolded. So the story kind of tells itself to us. We’re also in television, where it could go on forever, or it could stop tomorrow. You don’t know — you’re beholden to market forces, you’re beholden to the audience. But right now, everyone seems to enjoy the stories we’re telling. And we love telling them. Filoni: I think that in some ways you want each season to have a feeling of an ending. But in a lot of what I’ve done, I don’t like hard endings. I like reading books in a series and then thinking, “Oh, there’s another book, and this is going to keep going.” It’s always sad for me when an adventure ends and the characters are seemingly done with their journey. So I think there’s always that little bit of hope that something can continue. There’s a big question at the end of Season 2, of what will Mando do next? Is that relationship over? In life, things don’t always come to a perfect ending. I think things can continue on, and your adventure continues every day. I used to think JON FAVREAU AND DAVE FILONI TALK A LOT 64 APRIL 2023

about it with Clone Wars all the time. When is that battle over? When is that struggle over, because it culminates in Revenge Of The Sith? But that can’t be the ending for that show, even though that’s the ending of that era. That took a while to figure out. How did you decide to use Luke Skywalker? Filoni: It’s a big question for me always: do we bring in any of these characters or not? And I was telling Jon that as much as I wanted to have Ahsoka in the show, she can’t take this kid on. That’s just not what I have planned. Then Jon was like, “Who’s it going to be? Who’s gonna come and get him?” And we started logicing it out. If there’s one person that would be great to train Grogu, it’s Luke. It’s a big decision for many reasons. Forgetting the technological aspect of it, which is, how do you execute that and bring it to life? It’s this iconic character who’s the centre of the whole thing from when we were kids, and if you want to bring that character in, you make sure that there’s a good purpose behind it. And it’s not just, “Look, here’s Luke.” But in this time period he is the Jedi, he is the one person carrying on the legacy of what it means to be a Jedi, and perhaps improving on or having a new perspective on what it means to be a Jedi, compared to the prequel Jedi. And so he’s seeking out students, building a new Jedi Order. So Luke finding Grogu made the most sense. I told Jon, “What’s exciting is if we get Luke, we probably get R2.” And Jon lit up. He loves R2. I said, “We have to have that image of R2 and Grogu, how could we not?” For me, before I was writing anything I was always drawing. When Jon was describing Grogu to me in the beginning, I drew the little hovering pram sitting next to Mando. Favreau: I still have that. I keep all the originals. Filoni: But that’s the image, right? That’s it. It’s like drawing R2 with Grogu. That’s the image. What happens in The Book Of Boba Fett reverses what happened at the end of ❯ Left: A youthful Luke Skywalker (a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill) makes a welcome appearance in The Mandalorian Season 2. APRIL 2023 65 Above, top to bottom: Grogu continuing to steal hearts in Season 2 of The Mandalorian; Boba (Temuera Morrison) and Mando in The Book Of Boba Fett.

Season 2. You set up a Season 3 where Mando and Grogu would have been apart, at least for some of it. Was that something that happened when you started to break The Book Of Boba Fett? You thought, “People want to see these characters together as soon as possible”? Favreau: I think you had to service both things. Just because this kid has the potential and had training, does he belong away from the Mandalorian? I saw it more like [Peter Bogdanovich’s] Paper Moon, where the whole thing is about delivering the kid to the blood relative, only to realise that, whether genetically through her father or just through bonding, Tatum O’Neal has to end up with Ryan O’Neal. That ending feels really good to me. And this little kid [Grogu] is given a decision to choose. And the kid chooses the emotional relationship and wants to be with the Mandalorian, and passing up Yoda’s lightsaber. Part of you wants to see him develop in that way, and part the other. So you have this interesting character who has Jedi training to some extent, Force abilities, but also is joining the Mandalorian culture, which we’ve established is something that you can opt into. It demands a lot, it offers a lot. Historically, Mandalorians developed all of those tools and armour and weapons to be able to counteract the Force abilities of Jedi. So as a storyteller this offers tremendous opportunity. But yes, we couldn’t just hit a hard reset. It’s going to be interesting to see how this unfolds for people who may not have seen The Book Of Boba Fett. But I think The Book Of Boba Fett offered time to pass. You saw what Mando was like without Baby Yoda and we saw what Grogu was like without the Mandalorian and neither of them was doing too good. So them coming back together was a really good plot point that allows us to jump back into Season 3, while maintaining the central relationship. Let’s talk about how this all came together for you guys. Do you remember the first conversation you had? Favreau: Yeah. I was the luckiest boy in town because I got to go to Skywalker Ranch and do a sound-mix on Iron Man [which he directed]. Dave was there because he had been working in animation and he was getting ready to launch The Clone Wars, which nobody had seen and, I don’t think, even heard of. And I casually said, “Hey, if you ever need somebody to do a voice…” And then he called me up [to voice] Pre Vizsla [a Mandalorian warrior]. And then I got called again, because George decided that the weapon I should be using was the Darksaber, and they created the lore around that, so I remember having to re-record a lot. Then I had come in when Disney+ was announced, because I wanted to pitch The Mandalorian as a show to Kathy Kennedy. She said, “Do you know Dave Filoni? I’d like you to sit down with him.” Because he had been working on a project that felt like it was related enough, 66 APRIL 2023

that she should put us together instead of having us work separately. And we got together and we were like little kids playing with our Star Wars toys. Dave has a really good effect on me, where we could come out of a conversation and I’d want to run off and start writing. And then I would just send him pages. Even at Christmas, I was sending pages. Kathy had the insight to know that the two of us would really work well together. It was never my intention when I first came in with the pitch, but I can’t see it any other way now. Filoni: I felt instinctively when I saw Iron Man that Jon had a great handle on how Star Wars actually worked. It was a fun adventure — there were comedic elements, but there was also a lot of heart. That’s something that’s throughout Jon’s work, this feeling of heart. His stories, his characters really mean something to him. But I remember, I think you were mixing another film with Skywalker and I ran into you in the hallway when we were starting all this new Star Wars stuff. Favreau: It was probably Chef. Filoni: Yeah, and I was like, “I got to get you in on this. You’ve got to do one of these Star Wars movies.” I just thought he’d be a great fit for it. I didn’t know it would be a thing where I’m collaborating with him so directly, but I was excited when Kathy brought up the possibility because I had been looking for a way to get into the live-action side of things. I wanted to learn. I needed my own mentor. Dave, I imagine that a lot of people, had they been told that a guy was coming in to pitch something vaguely similar to something they were developing, would have thrown their toys out of the pram. You didn’t do that. Filoni: Star Wars is something that I’m lucky to be a part of. It’s a real privilege. It’s not mine. I know the guy who created it, I got to work with him, and he is a genius, George. And one thing I’ve also learned is a lot of people that like Star Wars, we all like the same things. So if I’m developing something around Mandalorians and then hear that Jon Favreau is developing something around a Mandalorian, that’s not surprising at all. You go, “Oh, they get it.” It was all just exciting. And I was curious to hear what he had to say because I know how creative he is, and we had a great time working together. When we did Clone Wars, and Pre Vizsla was being voiced, Jon was as busy as he could be with Iron Man, but he always took time to come and do our thing, to record the voice. That meant a lot. When I got to Lucasfilm in 2005, I thought this was going to be a great two-year animated series, and I’d have a great story about working at Lucasfilm. And now I’m still here. I’ve been here long enough that I have people on my animation team who were little kids of my directors and artists, that have grown up and now work for us. When I got to the set of The Mandalorian, people would come up to me and say, “Hey ❯ Far left: Paz Vizsla — a Mandalorian voiced by series creator Favreau (as an homage to his Clone Wars character Pre Vizsla) — and the Mandalorian (Pascal) in The Book Of Boba Fett. Left: The Darksaber in action in The Clone Wars. APRIL 2023 67

Dave, I love Clone Wars, are we going to do it?” And I actually got to tell the story. Jon, you’re the guy who launched the MCU. But you’ve said over the years that part of the reason you walked away after Iron Man 2 was that it was becoming a much bigger sandbox (leading to many more people involved, on a bigger scale). Did that experience give you pause before getting involved in this? Favreau: To be clear, I stayed involved very much [with the MCU]. I’m still very close with all those people. But the nature of my relationship changed, because it went from me being with a small group, creating a story, to something that was going to fit into something much bigger. And for me to be Happy Hogan was also a great opportunity to stay involved. It gave everybody room to figure out what their corner of the universe was going to be. Different people have different things that they’re good at. And for me there’s a certain scale that I’m most comfortable in. What’s nice about The Mandalorian is that I’m able to keep it at the scale that my creative process can accommodate. I love this form of storytelling, where you can come in, tell a story, and it fits into a longer thread. In Star Wars you could have Andor, even though it’s very different from animated stuff skewing younger, or Skeleton Crew, which has a young cast. How does that all fit together? The first Star Wars felt very innocent and really spoke to me as a young audience-member, but you could draw dotted lines between that and Rogue One, and it all fits together. That’s what the challenge here is. But if someone had said to you when you pitched The Mandalorian that you’d be running all these shows with Dave one day, would you have scoffed at that? Or did you think you might have stepped back to make movies? Favreau: I did know that if this could work out well, it’s something I would love to stay with. I don’t think it was just, “Pitch an idea, let me shoot a pilot, and I’ll move on.” I knew I cared enough about it to stay with it. But I’m at a point in my career where I’ve grown to appreciate it when you’re in this type of creative situation. I know these things don’t last forever. There’s a countless Rolodex of people who are all working on this because this is what they wanted to do. The thing with me sticking around and being Happy Hogan led me to being in Spider-Man, which led me to getting to know Jon Watts, which led me on the last movie to say, “I’m having so much fun in Star Wars,” thinking he might want to direct an episode like Peyton Reed did, or Taika [Waititi]. And he’s like, “Actually, we have a whole pitch.” And I heard it, called Dave, got him on Zoom and we were talking while I was between shoot days with Jon. That’s what organically turned into Skeleton Crew. Those episodes are all starting to be cut together. I just Right: Rosario Dawson brings Ahsoka Tano to the live-action Star Wars realm in The Mandalorian. 68 APRIL 2023

watched one of them last night — it’s delightful, it’s so fun — and then I’m working with Dave and getting to see all his episodes. It’s fun for me to watch Dave bring Ahsoka to life, or new directors coming up. Movies begin, you do ’em, they end, they come out, maybe you get together and try to do another one. It’s a different thing. This is a community that I’m a part of and it’s special. The Ahsoka show is coming up soon. Dave, you come from animation, and one of the joys of doing this must have been porting over those characters that mean a lot to you, and that you created in many cases — like Ahsoka, like Bo-Katan, like Cad Bane — into the live-action world. Filoni: Without a doubt. I was very interested in being on a set and watching a performance take shape. Kathy sent me to several of the movie sets that were happening when I was doing Rebels. That’d be Episode VII, Episode VIII, and Rogue One. Rian Johnson actually put me upfront quite a bit, right behind the camera, and he was the one who was saying most, “You’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do this, you can do this.” And I always wanted to bring these characters along because I liked them. It doesn’t get any more complex than that. It’s not a big strategic play, it’s not some big continuity thing; I really liked these characters. They are part of my Star Wars experience. It is a very bizarre thing to be standing there, talking to them. I see Rosario Dawson but I see her maybe early in the morning or maybe late after the shoot, but for the rest of the day when I see that person, I see Ahsoka, and it’s the most amazing thing to me. When Katee Sackhoff first started on Clone Wars, I said to her, “You never know... this goes right, this could be live-action one day.” And she looked at me like, “Uh-huh, okay, sure.” And then when it finally happened, she came to me and said, “I can’t believe we did it.” We did it. This is the biggest positive for everybody. We want to play and have these adventures, not just for the audience, but for ourselves. This is our Star Wars opportunity. APRIL 2023 69 Top: Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan Kryze — originally an animated character — in Season 2 of The Mandalorian. Above: Cad Bane (voiced by Corey Burton) in The Book Of Boba Fett.

I T ’ S O N L Y F E B R U A R Y , B U T INFINITY POOL I S A L R E A D Y A K E Y C O N T E N D E R F O R 2023’S WILDEST BREAKING THE WORDS HANNAH EWENS HORROR. WE ASK D I R E C T O R B R A N D O N C R O N E N B E R G W H Y H E M A K E S S U C H UNHINGED CINEMA 70 APRIL 2023

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Faces peeling away from skulls. A syringe containing a deadly virus piercing the skin. A man vomiting blood livestreamed across the world. Few filmmakers have burst onto the big screen with such strange and agitating creations as Brandon Cronenberg. The first mental challenge for audiences came in the form of his body-horror debut Antiviral (2012), in which celebrities’ illnesses are sold to rabid fans. In his second film, 2020’s Possessor, an assassin takes control of other people’s bodies via brain implants before encouraging suicide. But the horror, lust and disquieting feeling that envelops you watching those has nothing on the nightmarish new sci-fi Infinity Pool. Holidaying in a luxury resort, author James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his partner Em (Cleopatra Coleman) end up embroiled in a mess of violence and hedonism stoked (and sometimes led) by the alluring Gabi (Mia Goth). With pus-infected body parts, ritualistic executions and immaculate clones, it’s everything (and a whole lot more) you would expect from a child of the Baron of Blood, David Cronenberg. It’s not gore for gore’s sake, though. “If you just try to unsettle people with graphic imagery, it tends to fail,” argues the 43-year-old writer-director. “It can be shallow if it’s not also integrated in some way with the narrative. In this film, there’s a deliberate contrast between the gloss of the resort and civility of that familiar situation, and then this kind of animalistic sex and violence beneath the surface.” Cronenberg’s work is always rich in psychological detail, and deeply unnerving; the easily disturbed or weak-stomached better stay at home. Where does this come from? Given his heritage and previous films, you might assume that he grew up on a diet of horror cinema, but in fact, he was more into sci-fi literature, like the work of Philip K. Dick. No obvious touchstones or references, though, come to mind for Infinity Pool, he says. “It’s hard to talk about specific influences in that sense, because it’s usually not a conscious process for me. I absorb a bunch of stuff and pack it together into a weird loaf in the back of my brain somewhere. And then when I’m writing, I think like a rat. I just sort of start gnawing on that loaf and like getting whatever flavours are in it.” What a weird loaf it must have been this time.  INFINITY POOL’S BRUTALITY erupts around the resort the holidaymakers aren’t supposed to leave. It’s a terrifying place, but one not entirely pulled from Cronenberg’s imagination. “I’d been writing a short story about the doubling executions specifically,” he explains of Infinity Pool’s conception — in the film’s world, there’s a death penalty for certain crimes, but if you’re rich you can pay to be cloned and watch ‘yourself’ be killed instead. “As I started trying to expand it into a film, I kept remembering this strange vacation to the Dominican Republic that I had many years ago. It was the only time I went Top to bottom: Fun times — Gabi (Mia Goth) and James (Alexander Skarsgård) hit the bar; Director Brandon Cronenberg crafting chaos; Em (Cleopatra Coleman); Facing questions of identity; Things will get messy. Top: Gabi, impossible to resist. Here: Hedonism is spliced with violence. 72 APRIL 2023

to a traditional all-inclusive resort. I got talked into going there. It was totally weird, because they would bus you in, in the middle of the night so you wouldn’t see any of the surrounding area. You would be dropped off directly into a resort compound, which was surrounded by [a] razor-wire fence and completely contained. You weren’t allowed to leave the compound.”  Much of what he saw on that odd holiday inspired Infinity Pool. “At the end of this week they bus you back during the day, and you see that just outside the compound there’s this incredible poverty, people living in shacks,” he says. “And that contrast is incredibly disturbing and grotesque. It’s almost like you were at the embassy for this nation of tourism. Or it was an alternate dimension that grew up in this host country. And as long as you’re in the growth, you’re experiencing a weird Disneyland version of reality where there’s no culture and there’s no history, or the world is just reprocessed in this really tacky resort way. I kept going back to that experience because it seemed like an obvious setting for a story about people living without consequences.” An obvious comparison can be made to Mike White’s The White Lotus, a TV show about complex and manipulative wealthy guests tested by each other and, somehow, the setting itself: a luxury hotel. Alongside that, eat-the-rich tales have been abundant in film since 2019’s Parasite, with The Menu, Glass Onion and Triangle Of Sadness all released in the last few months. “It’s tempting to find a broad pattern and say it’s because of the current state of the economic divide and everybody’s frustrations and anxieties and the fear of the future, which all might be true, except that because of the glacial pace of filmmaking, I started working on this back in 2014,” Cronenberg says. “So, it’s sort of a coincidence that it came together at the same time as these other things.” Regardless of the eight years of toil that went into Infinity Pool, our collective appetite for these stories — some better conceived than others — is ravenous in this climate. And the psychology of James in Infinity Pool, driven towards a mother figure in Gabi, speaks to what many of us might enjoy in these uncertain times — a return to the womb. “It’s making fun of a certain kind of male insecurity — ultimately, that’s a lot of that character,” says Cronenberg of James’ mummy issues. “But also, for her I think the process that she enjoys, and that he then enjoys, and the kinkiness to their dynamic, is partly this idea of tearing him down to the point of being reborn and being a child. She’s almost birthing him, or birthing this new self.” Skarsgård and Goth’s willingness to fully commit to the subversive bit was seen at the Sundance Film Festival, where, promoting the film, Skarsgård got on all fours with a leash and dog collar, Goth towering over him. “I’ve honestly wanted to work with [Goth] for years, because she sears through the screen,” Cronenberg says. “She’s always stealing the scene, never making a boring choice. My completely simplistic and kind of stupid casting process is that you just find an actor who has whatever that difficult-to-articulate brilliant thing is, and you plug them into a role and let them kind of redefine that role for you.” Skarsgård, meanwhile, was the ideal candidate for the psychologically complex James, says Cronenberg. “He has this look and the charisma to be a studio actor but actually, he’s way more interesting than that. He loves to push himself to extremes. And so ❯ APRIL 2023 73

to have these two actors who like to go that far, and are totally fearless in that way, was completely delightful.” Part of the shoot involved living at a resort in Croatia, an experience Cronenberg found odd. “It was almost like living this weird mirror image of the film, because we were all there eating at the buffet and living at this surreal place. And so we were sort of completely immersed and being the characters in a sort of insane way.” Hopefully with a lot less blood, guts and perverse psychological torture.   C R O N E N B E R G I S U N A F R A I D to draw on difficult personal experiences to enrich his work. When he was promoting Antiviral, he found it hard to reconcile himself with the heightened version he was presenting to the media. Through that, Possessor was born, introducing a character (Andrea Riseborough’s Tasya Vos) undergoing a drastic identity crisis. In Infinity Pool, James is an unsuccessful author, with only one novel to his name and, when we meet him, a severe case of writer’s block. Later on, his egoic sensitivities are mercilessly prodded and poked. Was that a light jab at Cronenberg himself, presumably with vulnerabilities and an ego of his own? Absolutely, he says. “I actually wrote the film between my first film and Possessor. So there was an eight-year gap between those two films where Possessor kept falling apart. We couldn’t get the financing together, we couldn’t get the cast together. There were some pretty dark years where I was feeling deeply insecure, like most writers feel when they’re spinning their wheels. And definitely, though James isn’t the stand-in for me, some of that stuff was a way of mocking myself for my own kind of writer’s insecurities and fears about the future.” That deadpan comedy in Infinity Pool is clear, unlike the more serious Possessor, which focuses on the bleak deterioration of a woman’s psyche, or the darkly comic Antiviral. “I definitely would love it if the humour came across to people,” he says of Infinity Pool. “When I was doing an interview for my first film — I thought that film was a comedy — I remember a journalist getting incredibly mad at me at one point and telling me, ‘It’s not funny, it’s really disturbing,’ almost yelling at me. Because he was annoyed that I thought it was funny.” Infinity Pool is closest to the humour he prefers in culture and comedy himself. “If it’s extremely dry, to me that’s much more funny than when it’s really spelled out. I immediately lose any desire to laugh if the film or show is really winking at me in a serious way.”  Here, the laughs starkly contrast with the mental and emotional devastation that James puts himself through via seemingly uncharacteristic decisions. This porousness of self seems to be an obsession of Cronenberg’s, repeated across all his films. “I don’t think that we are anyone fundamentally,” he explains. “I think we’re this collection of impulses and weird ideas that we impose [as] an identity on ourselves, but so much of that comes from outside us,” he says, pointing to the advancement of social media as heightening that (un)reality. “You have Russian troll farms deliberately trying to influence elections by changing people’s political opinions, and we get instilled with these opinions and these feelings that we attribute to ourselves, but which are completely hackable in a sense, and subject to outside influence. And the ways that we internalise them and build ourselves and take ownership of things that come to us externally, I think is going to be increasingly difficult to navigate. We’re collective fictions that we’re making with each other. That, to me, is maybe part of why I like these kinds of stories.”  His worldview is baked into the aesthetic choices he makes too. Alongside Infinity Pool’s shocking execution scenes are wild, Here: Goth in the frame. “She sears through the screen,” says Cronenberg. Below: An intense connection. 74 APRIL 2023

psychedelic sex scenes, similar to the kaleidoscopic ones in Possessor, but this time fuelled by a local plant drug. Bright colours, moving swirls and tricks of the light — it makes you wonder whether Cronenberg is into hallucinogens himself. “I will not go on record and say I’ve done a lot of psychedelics,” he laughs, “but it’s something I like to explore in the context of a film that’s very subjective, because in both of those films, you’re really seeing it from the perspective of the protagonist. And they’re having experiences that really distort that experience and deform their image. Whether it’s the body possessions in Possessor, or the hallucinogens in Infinity Pool, to me, playing with deforming the actual image in a formal and psychedelic way is a great way to connect to an almost impressionistic sense of what it is to be seeing the film [through] the eyes of the character.” His experimental methods of creating that feeling of violently tripping through erotic moments were discovered by him and his cinematographer Karim Hussain during the filming of Possessor, and built upon for Infinity Pool. They used different gels, lights, glass and projections to amass hours and hours of footage to cut together. “I think I stood in Karim’s living room for 16 hours re-photographing shots with him through different dioptres,” Cronenberg recalls. “You then go through it and find those moments where all the practical effects give you a burst of something particularly interesting.” These are so surreal, conceived through manipulation, editing and luck, that they couldn’t appear in the script in any accurate sense. “I’ll write a very vague paragraph about weird shifting forms and flashes of imagery. And the people who’ve worked with me know that that’s code for, ‘We’re going to do a kind of experimental short film at some point. And we’ll figure it out when we get there,’” he smiles. AMBIGUITY IS INHERENT in any Cronenberg creation — and the reason why he’s tight-lipped on any questions related to specific scenes or puzzles his films lay out for us. “Part of the fun in being a film viewer is the creative act that you’re engaged in on your own,” he muses. “I think the art comes from the audience, because as you’re interpreting the film and building it for yourself, you’re making it in a sense, filling in the gaps.” By the time Infinity Pool’s credits roll, you might wonder if you could end up like James Foster. Each step into madness, lust, pleasureseeking and pointed aggression is laid out in front of him, easier to take than the last, but with greater consequences. “For so much of human history we’ve just been incredibly violent and horrible,” says Cronenberg. “If you look at how humans have behaved for most of the time, there hasn’t been anything like our modern sense of civility or peace — we’re a very violent animal. I think we’re plastic enough that in a modern society a lot of that can shift, and we can adapt to this different mode of being. But it still is in there. That dark animal quality to people that is very much just beneath the surface can boil over, the moment it’s given a chance to.” If you want to explore that animalism, how easy it can be to wear a mask and wreak havoc… plunge into Infinity Pool and find out. INFINITY POOL IS IN CINEMAS FROM 24 MARCH Top to bottom: A light moment between takes on 2020’s Possessor; A somewhat less light moment for Christopher Abbott, as the stricken Colin, in the same; Caleb Landry Jones up to no good in 2012’s Antiviral; A relaxed Gabi in Infinity Pool; Skarsgård, the man behind the mask in Cronenberg’s latest opus. APRIL 2023 75

COMING A L M O S T T W O D E C A D E S I N T O A C H A M E L E O N I C CAREER, TO LESLIE’ S O S C A R N O M I N AT I O N H A S C ATA P U LT E D A N D R E A R I S E B O R O U G H T O C E N T R E S TA G E . W E M E E T H E R I N THE MIDST OF A DEFINING MOMENT Andrea Riseborough, photographed exclusively for Empire at Big Sky Studios, London, on 26 January 2023. WORDS OLLY RICHARDS PHOTOGRAPHY ZOE McCONNELL 76 APRIL 2023

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In To Leslie, she gives the best performance of her career, as a lottery winner who loses it all and becomes a homeless alcoholic. Released last year, it was ignored at the box office and not even part of the awards-season conversation, until Riseborough and the film’s director, Michael Morris, enlisted notable celebrities — Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Jane Fonda, Laura Dern and more — to spread the word for a film that made just $27,000 worldwide. The result was the biggest Oscar-nomination surprise in memory. Riseborough’s appearance on the shortlist couldn’t have been predicted before January, but such recognition is long overdue: this is far from the first incredible performance by one of the most versatile actors working today. Since the start of her screen career in 2005, she’s disappeared into roles — from Birdman to Matilda The Musical to Mandy to Oblivion, she is never the same twice. We met her in London, two days after the Oscar nominations were announced, to talk about the unlikely triumph of To Leslie and why Riseborough decided to stop being Britain’s most underrated actor and take the spotlight. Congratulations on the nomination. How’s it feeling? Wonderful. The day that it happened, [her partner] Karim said something to me that didn’t really sink in at the time: So many more people are going to see [2020’s] Luxor. So many more people are going to see [2022’s] Please Baby Please. [2018’s] Nancy. [2021’s] Here Before. It made me so happy. The day of finding out was so odd, because it was such a surprise. The second day was like finding it out all over again. Then the third day was realising how much this will mean for a lot of people and for a lot of films that were shot in about 19 days. Let’s go back to October 2022. To Leslie got fantastic reviews at festivals, then it was released and nobody watched it. How did you feel? It felt like such a wasted opportunity. With a film like this, getting it into a small run in theatres means everything, because that’s how people can tell other people about it. [To Leslie was released simultaneously on-demand and on a very small number of screens in the US; in the UK it was released on two screens, making £1,287.] The distributors [Momentum Pictures] just hadn’t had that plan, or it seems like it wasn’t their plan. So many actors have projects they loved making that audiences just didn’t see. Usually they move on to the next thing. Why didn’t you let this one go? I’m like that with all of them! I love film and the most wonderful part of the process is sharing it. Usually [after release] you have a moment to look back and think, ‘Okay, that was that,’ and you close that chapter. But when the chapter feels nowhere near being closed and it’s only been seen by three people at the Angelika, you feel so despondent and you start really losing faith in the power that something very pure can break through all the noise. Sometimes you want to jump out of your own industry because that thing that made you want to do this in the beginning [seems gone], so you have to come back round and find it. This campaign was entirely driven by you, To Leslie’s director Michael Morris and one of your producers, Claude Dal Farra. You had these enormous names — Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Charlize Theron — coming out in support of the film. How was that orchestrated? Do you just have Hollywood’s best Rolodex? Well, I’d never met Gwyneth Paltrow before this experience and I’ve still never met Jennifer Aniston. I think when Michael and Mary [McCormack, Morris’ wife] and Claude made the full realisation of how unsupported we were going to be, they reached out to all the people they could to talk about the film. As they did that, those people loved it so much that they reached out to five or ten more people. Then those people reached out to five or ten more. If it hadn’t been good then that wouldn’t have happened. What has this experience meant to you? One of the things we did, because we didn’t have campaign money, was Q&As, which cost nothing, and people can ask questions. I feel changed after having shared this film. In what way? You have so many conversations where people just pour their hearts out. You’ve been part of something and then people tell you it really meant something to them. I’ve never had this experience before, but so many people wanted to say to us, “I’ve been in that [situation].” Maybe not her position, but that dynamic. Well, it is that kind of film where everyone can relate to something. Everyone’s either felt lost or felt like someone they love is getting lost. Exactly. Loving someone and being pushed away by them. It’s like loving a hedgehog! You can’t reach them. And one of the things that’s so beautiful about the film is that in all those scenes where she’s disgruntled at the world, as steeped in victimhood and self-pity as she is, she’s absolutely correct to be! She’s broken. And in a world that is utterly broken. Clearly, playing Leslie was a special experience, but was it actually a fun one? No. No, no, no. I felt isolated. I weighed about 85lb at the end of it and wasn’t looking well at all by the time we got to Christmas — we wrapped a day or two before Christmas. It was 2020, so the height of the pandemic. I was very much trying to take care of myself, as a human in this situation, but because of the character I wasn’t doing that well. So in many ways, thank God we shot it in 19 days. At the time it seemed like a massive disadvantage, but looking back, it made it this incredible, dedicated, immediate process where we didn’t have more than one or two takes for each shot. Maybe if it had been more drawn out it would have been difficult to sustain emotionally. A lot of reporting around your nomination was about an underrated actor finally getting the attention she deserves. Did you feel like people hadn’t been paying attention? No. Not inside my community, which is what’s meaningful to me. The kind of work I’m interested in has just afforded me a bit of anonymity. I really enjoy playing characters who are different from me in a lot of ways. I don’t know how to answer this, really. I want to be able to work, and I hope and pray I’ll be able to do that all my life. If you enjoy having that anonymity, how do you feel about the new attention this will bring? Your name will now always have ANDREA RISEBOROUGH WA S A S S U R P R I S E D A S YO U W E R E W H E N H E R N A M E WA S A M O N G T H E N O M I N E E S F O R T H I S Y E A R ’ S B E S T A C T R E S S O S C A R . AT T H E B E G I N N I N G O F J A N U A R Y, A L M O S T N O B O DY H A D E V E N H E A R D O F H E R F I L M . Below, top to bottom: Riseborough in her Oscarnominated role in To Leslie; She plays a single mother from West Texas who rapidly squanders her big lottery win. Styling: Leith Clark at The Wall Group, Assisted by: Delany Williams, Hair & make-up: Charlotte Hayward at The Wall Group. Previous page: Black sleeveless dress, stockings and heels: Dior. This page: Black slip with white puff sleeves: Rejina Pyo. Dress and gold necklace: Andrea’s own. ❯ 78 APRIL 2023

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“Academy Award nominee/winner” above it on the poster. You can’t be so much under the radar anymore. I don’t know yet. It’s an interesting question. I think it will become clearer as time goes on. The reality is it [the Oscar credit] will be there to sell things. I know it does change your reality in a certain way, but I don’t know how yet.   Looking through your list of films, it’s impossible to find a throughline. Any actor wants to play a variety of roles, but you seem to always do something unlike anything you’ve done before. In 2022 alone you’ve been in To Leslie, Please Baby Please [a highly stylised queer gang musical], Amsterdam [David O. Russell’s big, glossy political drama] and Matilda [an adaptation of the hit family stage musical]. How do you choose projects? It’s just loving good filmmakers. Michael I worked with on [Netflix show] Bloodline and To Leslie is his first feature. He was so connected to it. Christina Choe [Nancy] is incredible. Amanda Kramer [Please Baby Please] is incredible. This almost makes my blood boil… I feel like there are so many brilliant writers and directors out there who just need to be given an opportunity. I’m seeing their work and helping develop it. I mean, Christina and Amanda need no help. They’re brilliant. But there are things I can do. I can rally creatives around and say, “Can you believe this exists? Wouldn’t you love to make this?” That’s happened so many times. It happened [bringing] Steve Buscemi and John Leguizamo on Nancy. And Demi Moore on Please Baby Please. I guess I’ve just never understood what the scary bit is. The scary bit of…? Backing things that are unusual. But it makes me feel really disheartened, because then it makes me think everything must be about money, which kind of makes me want to rip my heart out with a spoon, to quote Alan Rickman in Robin Hood. Well, a lot of it is, yes, but the fact you’re making these films means they can still exist. You’ll never get the same audience size as a superhero movie, but there is an audience. What you’ve just done with To Leslie maybe shows the kind of effort it can take to get eyes on a small film now. I think To Leslie is such a hark back to ’70s cinema. It’s a very simple film. It’s characterdriven. Even the story itself is real [it’s loosely based on writer Ryan Binaco’s mother]. She actually won the lottery and was homeless. The most sensational parts of the film are true. I think it’s like those mainstream ’70s films that everyone would go and see. They’d have huge releases. But then there were fewer films. Fewer directors. You’ve worked with a massive amount of fascinating people in your career, so we’d be here for days if we covered them all. I want to ask you about working with two of the most influential. First: Madonna. You played Wallis Simpson in W.E., which she directed. Whenever Madonna does anything in film, the knives are out before she even begins. What was the experience like from the inside? I think when people are as powerful and strong as Madonna, there are always people waiting in the wings to pull down whatever is created by that person. One of the things I loved about her is she’s such a wonderful perfectionist. Every last detail was taken care of. There was nothing she didn’t know about the character. That’s rare with a director. They often gift you the soul of the character, if that makes sense. She was living it with me. I also realised working with her that I’d rarely had a chance to work with anybody female directing me. So when I started to have these conversations after the film about, “What was it like to be directed by a woman?”, I felt very resistant. I’d so hoped that we were beyond that and that everyone was on an equal playing field, but we’re so far from that still. Whether people think she’s a good filmmaker or not, Madonna certainly seems to be someone who does what she wants. She’s earned power and uses it. How important was it to see that at a relatively early point in your career? In every way. There are all these gender normative things we all inherit when things look the same way for so long. Sometimes it takes you a while to see you had the great fortune to experience something different. For me, working with her early on was a huge freedom. You haven’t dabbled in the blockbuster world often and you’ve spoken about working on [sci-fi drama] Oblivion being an “isolating” experience. Your first big-budget film was with Tom Cruise, the king of blockbusters. What’s that like? What happened that made you know it wasn’t the world for you? I don’t think I did realise it wasn’t the world for me. Every time I talk to people about this, they’ve interpreted [it] how they want, I think. My experience working with Tom on Oblivion was so fucking brilliant, fun and inspiring. He’s so dedicated. He’s a leader. He’s so enthusiastic. He rallies people and everyone becomes enthusiastic around him. It’s sort of addictive. I really enjoyed working with [director] Joe Kosinski too. I’m so director-driven. The thing I enjoyed less — and this is why I’m not very good at long, episodic television things either — is that I find it confusing when there are lots of voices on something. Maybe it’s because I come from classical theatre, where it’s very clear who the helmsman is. When you have clarity, it’s magical, because you can completely exist in the situation as the character. When you’re really unsure of what everyone wants and some of what they want seems to be breast pads… You mean as in being asked to pad your breasts? Yeah. Then you don’t really know where you are. But I’m not against studio films. Amsterdam was a studio film. Birdman was a studio film. When you have a helmsman like Alejandro [González Iñárritu] or David [O. Russell], you’re really not unsure of where you’re supposed to be. So you’d do a big-budget movie again? I would love to work with Joe Kosinski again. I’m sure, as time goes on, there will be less and less people Joe has to answer to. We’re all afforded that later in our careers and we have to earn it, and rightly so. Do you know where you’d like things to go next? You’re just about to start shooting The Palace for HBO. The logline says it’s about an unravelling authoritarian regime. It’s a bit like if The Favourite and The Death Of Stalin had a baby, starring Kate Winslet. It’s a mini-series. One of the best things I’ve read in the past ten years. Political satire is the best way to describe it.   And what about after? I’m always working on things. There are lots of things I’m developing. I just love working with great directors and actors. And you are loving it again now? You’ve said that a few years ago you’d had enough. That’s happened a few times. Once when I was about 19, because I’d been playing kids in theatre productions since I was quite young. Then again shortly after Birdman, because it was a time when I needed a break from it in order to want to do it again. I think it’s important to have those times. They give you a chance to understand why you’re doing something and miss it and then fall in love with it again. I am in love with it again. TO LESLIE IS OUT NOW ON DIGITAL Top to bottom: Working with Madonna on W.E in 2011; With Tom Cruise in Oblivion; On the set of Birdman with Naomi Watts and director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Black sleeveless dress: Dior. Additional images: Alamy 80 APRIL 2023

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S I N C E T H E G A M E W A S C R E A T E D F I V E D E C A D E S A G O , T H E F A N S H A V E B E E N C R Y I N G O U T F O R A W O R T H Y M O V I E . CAN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES F I N A L LY G E T T H AT R I G H T ? B R I N G O N T H E G E L AT I N O U S C U B E S … 82 APRIL 2023

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His adventure started promisingly, with CBS greenlighting a kitsch Saturday-morning cartoon series about a gang of kids thrown into a D&D world via a magical fairground ride. But, despite a few encouraging initial responses, he was unable to seal a movie deal. Beset by a corporate struggle that eventually exiled him from his own company, and a ‘Satanic Panic’ in the States that saw religious leaders and concerned parents absurdly attacking the game as promoting devil-worship and teenage suicide, Gygax (who died in 2008) had to abandon his mission. Later attempts at a D&D movie proved less than salutary, even though the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron and Joel Silver expressed interest over the years. In 2000, first-time director-producer Courtney Solomon — who’d somehow talked TSR into selling him the rights a decade earlier, when he was only 19 years old — made Dungeons & Dragons. Starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans, this sadly half-baked misadventure bombed on release and was critically mauled. “The truth is, there hasn’t been a movie or a show that has done justice to this game,” says Jonathan Goldstein, who first played D&D as a kid around the time Gygax was landing in Hollywood. “It’s so good. It really deserves better.” Goldstein is one half of a writer-director team with John Francis Daley, a former child actor who memorably played D&D on screen in the final episode of cult high-school comedy series Freaks And Geeks, kindling his love for the game off-screen. Together, they are taking on the biggest challenge of their shared career: completing Gary Gygax’s quest. aley and Goldstein first met while working on short-lived sitcom The Geena Davis Show in 2000. Daley, in his mid-teens, was starring in it; Goldstein, a former lawyer, was on the writing staff. “We found we shared very similar sensibilities,” Daley tells Empire, just as they’re finishing the sound mix on their Dungeons & Dragons film.     They went on to enjoy success with their scripts for Horrible Bosses, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, but shared Spielberg-inspired childhood dreams of directing. These were realised with 2015 legacy comedy Vacation, then more impressively with 2018’s Game Night. “That was us seeing if we could pull off a comedy that looks and feels entirely different,” says Daley of the latter. “After we got a positive response to it, we were emboldened to reach even further.”     Dungeons & Dragons came their way almost by chance, when Daley bumped into motionpicture literary agent Matt Martin in a bar one afternoon and mentioned that he and Goldstein were looking for something new. At the time, they were writing and storyboarding The Flash, but, to cut a long story short, they wanted out. Now under a new publisher, Wizards Of The Coast (owned by toy giant Hasbro), D&D was more popular than ever (thanks in part to its prominence in Stranger Things), and a new film In March 1983, Gary Gygax, co-creator of fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and president of its then-publishing company TSR, moved from his hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to Hollywood. His holy grail? To turn his ground-breaking tabletop game of monster-bashing, treasure-grabbing, dungeonmastering and funny-shaped-dice-throwing into a big-screen blockbuster. It wasn’t such a crazy idea. D&D was so popular by then that TSR was turning over $30 million per year. The game had even recently made a high-profile cameo in E.T.. Gygax, a former insurance underwriter who’d invented D&D in his basement a decade earlier (in collaboration with David Arneson), believed his Tolkien-riffing creation, in which players embarked on imaginary adventures as elves, dwarves, fighters and magic-users, was ideal material for cinema. He’d already commissioned a script, by James Goldman (The Lion In Winter, Robin And Marian), and promised readers of the TSR-published Dragon magazine that the eventual film would match Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. “Give us a chance to prove that the [fantasy] genre can be good!” he wrote. From his opulent Beverly Hills estate formerly owned by Golden Age director King Vidor, where Gygax threw cocaine-fuelled parties, he pitched studio executives including Universal’s Sid Sheinberg, and met with filmmakers like Excalibur director John Boorman and Orson Welles (who Gygax wanted for the role of “a villainous mage”). 84 APRIL 2023

Left: Cornered: Chris Pine’s Edgin. Above: Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), Edgin and Simon (Justice Smith) with a startled Doric (Sophia Lillis). Right: Hugh Grant flexes his inner villain as Forge Fitzwilliam. version of the game.” And play is what they did. In their biggest, deepest sandbox yet. onour Among Thieves is rooted firmly in the game’s lore. It is located in D&D’s perilous Forgotten Realms, draws on its vast array of magic spells (from Maximilian’s Earthen Grasp to Bigby’s Hand), and features a host of bizarre creatures from its Monster Manual (a displacer beast, a gelatinous cube, a frickin’ owlbear…). But its focus is firmly on its characters, all Daley/ Goldstein originals, who must come together to rescue the world from a threat for which they themselves are partly responsible.     They’re not heroes of great power and renown, mind you. “When you create your character in D&D, you roll the dice,” explains Goldstein. “Some things you come out really strong on. Other things you’re crap on. All of our characters rolled low on certain aspects. They’re kind of a mixed bag.”     The de facto leader of this ragtag bunch is Chris Pine’s Edgin, a has-been bard whose one-time heroic intentions have fallen afoul of his predilection for shiny things. Ed isn’t much good at anything other than thinking up plans and playing the lute (and he’s not even great at that). “I’ve made a small niche business of being in these big tentpoles without having any sort of special superpower,” smiles Pine (formerly Captain Kirk and Wonder Woman’s Steve Trevor). “I think it’s maybe my affinity to the Indiana Joneses of the world — you know, the guys that can always take a punch but keep on going back at it. Besides, it makes my life a lot easier [as an actor], because I don’t have to learn any choreography. While everybody else is spending hours learning how to flip people, I’m off reading a book.”     Ed’s best friend — and top people-flipper — is the barbarian Holga, aka Michelle had been in the works at Paramount Pictures since 2017, following years of rights-tussling.     According to Daley, at their first meeting Paramount boss Jon Gonda said it felt like an “odd move” to go with them for a big fantasy movie. “But as we started talking about it, it became clearer it was a really good fit, because D&D inherently has a lot of humour in it, and has a lot of fun with the fantasy genre. You can tell there’s inspiration from Monty Python as well as Lord Of The Rings. I think that’s what sets it apart from anything else in fantasy in such a delicious way.”     The key thing for them was not merely to adapt Dungeons & Dragons, but to capture the spirit of playing it. “If the movie didn’t do that,” says Goldstein, “then it wouldn’t be a successful Here: Torches ahoy as bard Edgin takes the lead. Below: Barbarian Holga does her barbarian thing. ❯ APRIL 2023 85

Rodriguez, who reveals to Empire she “played around with the dungeon world” when she was a teenager. Rodriguez particularly loves how Daley and Goldstein “went the underdog route” with their characters, including Holga, who’s been rejected by her tribe. “It’s what I think most people who don’t play the game will relate to,” Rodriguez says.     Joining this platonic couple are Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s Justice Smith as Simon, a half-elf sorcerer with self-confidence issues (“He has an incredible power within; he just doesn’t know how to access that and he’s always beating himself up,” Smith says); IT’s Sophia Lillis as shapeshifting druid Doric, whose fiendish heritage has alienated her from humans (“She’s very tough and closed off,” says Lillis, who, like Rodriguez, played D&D at high school); and Bridgerton breakout Regé-Jean Page as Xenk, a paladin in gleaming armour who’s so intensely earnest he lacks any sense of humour or irony. “If he were a player, he’d be the one that takes it all too seriously,” laughs Daley.     Then there’s Hugh Grant, adding another cad to his recent rogues’ gallery as the party’s con-artist ally Forge Fitzwilliam. “I love a total fraud,” Grant says. “It suits me. The more duplicitous and diabolical and selfish and vain a character is these days, the more it appeals to me. I don’t know what that says about me.”     Such was Daley and Goldstein’s dedication to capturing the spirit of D&D in this film, they brought together all the cast (except Grant — “They don’t like me,” he deadpans) for a game, just before shooting kicked off in Belfast.     “It was a very good introduction to how we were going to play these characters on set,” says Lillis. “John and Jonathan played too, as a two-headed aarakocra [bird person] named Jonathan, which was really funny.” Pine appreciated it as “a nice way to see people come to life in a safe setting before there were some actual stakes when we had to put it down on film.” For Smith, meanwhile, it was a great introduction to the game itself. “D&D is acting, essentially. It’s just improv. So it was more fun and familiar than I’d ever imagined.” By the time filming started, Smith says, “I felt like I was just going to be playing a more expensive version of the game.” s well as bringing the funny, and their love for the material, Daley and Goldstein were also determined to ensure the film delivered as an action spectacle, meticulously designing the major set-pieces. In each, says Daley, “there is some signature thing that makes it different from the more generic sequences that I think audiences have grown very tired of.” He gives the example of a frantic chase scene featuring Lillis’ character Doric, one of the film’s inventive, kinetic highlights. “We’re following her shifting from animal to animal in a oner [single take] so that we’re entirely immersed in the experience and feeling like we’re there with her, being constantly pursued.”     It seems the pair have levelled up as directors while making Honour Among Thieves. “This film was the most challenging thing either of us have done,” says Goldstein. “Man, it was difficult,” sighs Daley. “There were times where I literally thought I might die of a heart attack just from the sheer amount of espresso I was consuming.”     While the film inevitably involves extensive digital effects, they committed to using as many set builds, locations and practical effects as possible, hiring Legacy Effects (creators of Grogu) to breathe life into some of D&D’s more exotic species, such as tabaxi (cat people), dragonborn (dragon people) and an aarakocra named Jonathan (with only one head this time). “Because of their choice to build analogue, it felt really epic,” says Rodriguez. “It was very helpful to have amazing sets, great costumes and Top: Much Strength, Dexterity and Constitution required. Above: Daisy Head plays Sofina — no friend to polyester. 86 APRIL 2023

E.T. (1982) It’s the grand-daddy of all D&D appearances, where we find Mike (Robert MacNaughton) and his buddies playing a game that little Elliott (Henry Thomas) desperately wants to join. “How do you win at this game anyway?” wonders Elliott’s mum (Dee Wallace). “There’s no winning, it’s like life,” Dungeon Master Steve (Sean Frye) sagely replies. FREAKS AND GEEKS (1999-2000) Proving D&D can bring anyone together, the finale of Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s truncated show touchingly brings James Franco’s Daniel into the nerdy circle of Sam Weir (that there John Francis Daley). At first, he’s not sure about joining in as ‘Carlos The Dwarf’, but by the end of the campaign, Daniel’s asking to play again. Awwww. GRAVITY FALLS(2012-2016) This criminally underseen animated show devotes an episode to a game called ‘Dungeons, Dungeons And More Dungeons’. “The rules are simple,” offers keen player Dipper (Jason Ritter): “First you roll a 38-sided die to determine the level of each player’s statistical-analysis power orb...” Unicorn-obsessed twin sister Mabel (Kristen Schaal) isn’t impressed. like “Homework: The Game.” STRANGER THINGS(2016-) The Duffer brothers’ ’80s-nostalgia-fest did for D&D what Sex And The City did for Manolos. Not only do the main characters play it from Episode 1 onwards, right through to their Season 4 sessions, but its fantasy lore is part of their lexicon: Mind Flayer, Demogorgon, Vecna... All from the game. D&D’S GREATEST POP-CULTURE CAMEOS ON BOARD of the game,” says Goldstein. “I would always go back to, ‘Would my mom understand this?’”     One thing Mrs Goldstein might appreciate is how surprisingly touching the film becomes amid all its silliness and spectacle. “There really is an emotional story at the core of this thing,” Goldstein insists. “It’s not just about swordplay and dragons. I mean, we had people in test audiences crying at the end. It’s the most emotional Dungeons & Dragons movie ever made!” Daley interjects: “That’s a low bar.”     With a new D&D Paramount+ show recently announced (showrun by Dodgeball director Rawson Marshall Thurber; Daley and Goldstein aren’t involved), it’s obvious the studio has faith in the movie’s reach. But while Grant mentions that Daley and Goldstein have started work on a sequel script, the guys themselves hold back from confirming anything. “We never saw this as the first movie of a trilogy or anything like that,” claims Daley. “I mean, stand-alone movies are hard enough to get right.”     However, Goldstein adds, “If we’re fortunate enough that people go see it and enjoy it, we’re certainly open to continuing the journey. It would be a bummer for us to create this world and then not see it through to its next iteration.” “Regardless of how it does, we’re just so happy we got to make the film that we’re proud of and set out to make,” says Daley. “This is very much what we had envisioned when we first conceived it.” How close it comes to Gary Gygax’s original vision is less certain; it doesn’t feature Orson Welles as a wizard, for a start. But we suspect, if nothing else, it would have given him a good laugh. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES IS IN CINEMAS FROM 31 MARCH fantastic animatronics. Any time we’d lose our enthusiasm, we’d go to set and all of a sudden, boom, we’re back. We’re making magic.”     For Grant, who hasn’t ever made a film like this before, it was all something of a bemusing novelty. “Just when you thought you were doing a rather powerful or amusing little bit of acting, you’d realise there was a fucking dragon walking past you in the background, stealing your thunder,” he says. “There was a lot of incredibly intricate, I don’t know what you call it…” Animatronics? “Animatronics! Terrifying. A fish that eats babies! And suddenly the whole floor of the set would be quicksand! I wish I’d had my children with me. They would have liked that.” ith so many knowing references to the game — whether played straight or for laughs — D&D players also might like it. Even those still stung by the last film. “My sense is that they may not hate it,” ventures Grant (though he admits he’s still a D&D “virgin”). Pine agrees. “I think we benefitted from having Wizards Of The Coast involved, so we could make something that was in line with the world. But you also need to have artists with a perspective to bring it to life, and I credit John and Jonathan with having a viewpoint. They can own it and either cry victory or fall on their sword, so to speak. But it’s not diluted, and I feel quite proud of that. I think we made a film that both players and non-players will like.”     This mention of non-players is important. Pine’s dungeon-masters knew they wouldn’t get away with two hours of owlbear-baiting fan service. “We created each sequence in a way that, if you know nothing about D&D, you’re still gonna enjoy it, because it’s not specific to your knowledge Main: Paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page) and the gang. A Saving Throw would be good round about now. Below, top to bottom: Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley with Pine on set; Red wizard Dralas (Jason Wong) takes on Xenk; Holga and Edgin mid-campaign. APRIL 2023 87

MABEL NORMAND WA S A S I L E N T- F I L M S U P E R S TA R W H O B R O K E B OX - O F F I C E R E C O R D S , M E N T O R E D C H A R L I E C H A P L I N A N D. . . D I S A P P E A R E D. W E I N V E S T I G AT E T H E T H R I L L I N G R I S E A N D D R A M AT I C FA L L O F A L O ST H O L LY WO O D I C O N WORDS TOM ELLEN 88 APRIL 2023

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xactly three months before the Armistice of Compiègne would bring an end to the First World War, police were called to the small town of Bayside, Queens, near Long Island. It was 11 August 1918. The disturbance had nothing to do with the war, nor with the deadly ‘Spanish flu’ virus that was already creeping through the US. In fact, it was caused by a movie. The silent comedy Mickey had opened that afternoon in Bayside, and excited fans were soon jostling for position in a queue that snaked back three blocks. The cinema played the film on repeat until midnight, but the punters kept coming. Terrified of missing out, the crowd began pushing and shoving, and the cops were summoned to keep order. It was a good indication of things to come. In an era when even the biggest films lasted no more than a year in theatres, Mickey eventually closed in 1922, having shifted 40.9 million tickets: a box-office record that would not be broken for nearly two decades. Cinema owners nicknamed it ‘the mortgage-lifter’. More incredibly, these unprecedented takings were collected during an international health scare. By the early 1920s, Spanish flu had claimed over half a million American lives, and fear of infection left restaurants, music halls and even churches empty. But still people flocked to see Mickey. A century before SpiderMan: No Way Home, here was proof that a deadly pandemic is no match for an unmissable movie. The film’s enduring appeal was inarguably down to its star: 25-year-old actor, director, stuntwoman and studio head Mabel Normand. Playing the titular orphan character, Normand flipped gender norms, rejecting the damsel-in-distress leading-lady trope to embody a mischievous, goofy tomboy. Audiences lapped it up: Mickey hats, dresses and lantern slides sold by the truckload, and the film’s theme song shifted 500,000 copies in four days. A new adjective, ‘Mabelescent’, was coined to mean, “bubbly, vivacious, sparkling, in the manner of Mabel Normand”. Critics were as bewitched as the public. “No creation in drama, fiction, screen, or song has caught the public fancy and been taken to the public heart as Mickey has,” gushed The Tattler. “She will go down in popular history!” They were way off the mark there. Twelve years later, Normand was dead, her career in tatters following brushes with drink, drugs and murder. Today, her protégés and peers — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy — remain household names, while Normand is barely spoken of outside silent-film academia. The story of how Hollywood’s first female comedy star dwindled to a footnote is a strange and shocking one — even if Normand herself seems to have half-expected it. “People enjoy laughter,” she once told a reporter, “but they’re not grateful for it. They forget.” How right she was. Above: Normand doing a bit of light lion-taming for 1923’s The Extra Girl. Below: In propaganda piece Joan Of Plattsburg (1918). 90 APRIL 2023

AMABEL ETHELREID NORMAND was born in New Brighton, Staten Island, to a workingclass French-Irish family. According to an early biography of her long-time romantic and creative partner, Mack Sennett, the youthful Mabel was, “Five feet four inches tall... could swim, dive, ride, shoot and played only with boys. She was an arrant tomboy and a jokester.” At 15, she dreamed of being an illustrator, and decided the best way in was to become an artist’s model. However, when friends from the modelling industry began drifting towards that exciting new medium — film — Normand eagerly followed suit. A photographer she knew put her forward as “the prettiest girl in New York”, and Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Studios signed her. But while Normand had the looks of a romantic lead, her spontaneity, wit and penchant for practical jokes made her perfect for comedy. Over a series of ‘one-reelers’ (15-minute short films), she developed a character called ‘Vitagraph Betty’: a roguish, cross-dressing prankster who was essentially a prototype for Mickey. Audiences delighted at Betty’s scrapes, and the franchise was a hit. “From the start, she’s so comfortable with the camera,” Steve Massa, silent-film historian and author of the book Slapstick Divas, tells Empire. “Most silent-film actors had come from theatre, so they had to get used to the camera: learn to be more economic and not so ‘big’ in their performance. But Mabel knew the camera from modelling, and she had no stage training to unlearn. Where others were playing to the back row, she was sly, low-key, subtle — and very funny.” Less low-key and subtle — but equally funny — was her reason for leaving Vitagraph. Every morning before shooting, Normand would endure carriage-loads of commuters gawping at her from the elevated-train tracks outside her dressing room. Like any self-respecting ‘jokester’, she expressed her dissatisfaction by mooning the passengers as they passed. When the railroad company complained, she stood firm, demanding: “What do those dirty dogs want to look in my window for anyway?!” Vitagraph took the question to be rhetorical, and sacked her. But if Vitagraph couldn’t see Normand’s full potential, Mack Sennett definitely could. An ambitious director from Canada, Sennett was gobsmacked by Normand’s versatility. Here was someone that could play both bombshell and clown — often in the same movie. Throw in her bravery and physicality (she did all her own stunts, from cliff dives and soaring in biplanes to larking about with live bears), and Sennett was convinced this girl could be a superstar. The two became romantically involved, and when Sennett moved to California in 1912 to launch his own studio, Keystone, Normand went with him. Today, Keystone Studios is best remembered for the Keystone Cops series — a cartoonish franchise featuring a bungling police force — but in the mid-1910s it was a training ground for silent comedy’s biggest names. Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd and many more cut their teeth on Sennett’s lot. But Normand was the leading light: the “sugar on the Keystone grapefruit”, as playbills dubbed her. Her popularity was such that, within months of setting up shop, Sennett was inserting her name into the film titles: Mabel’s Blunder, Mabel’s Stormy Love Affair, Mabel At The Wheel. Slate film critic Dana Stevens — whose book on Buster Keaton (Camera Man) also examines Normand’s career — breaks down her unique appeal to Empire: This page, top to bottom: Normand with Fatty Arbuckle in Keystone’s Fatty And Mabel Adrift (1916); Horsing around with Lew Cody for mega-hit Mickey (1918); Gentlemen Of Nerve, one of many 1914 collaborations for Normand and Charlie Chaplin. ❯ APRIL 2023 91

“She’s certainly a physical comedian and she can do pratfalls, but her humour isn’t stunt and gag-based, like Chaplin’s or Keaton’s. It’s character comedy — Mabel does things in an unexpected way for the gender roles of the time. She’s fiercer, braver and funnier than you’d expect a pretty girl in petticoats to be.” From the get-go, Keystone was a guerrilla operation. Sennett was an advocate of cost-cutting and spontaneity, so if word got out that a barn was on fire or a lake was being dredged somewhere in Los Angeles, he would dispatch a camera crew to shoot Normand howling before the flames or trudging through the mud, and they’d work a plot around it later. “At the start of the day, you wouldn’t necessarily know what movie you were making,” Stevens says. “You made it up as you went along.” It was improvisational comedy on a grand scale, and Normand was usually behind the best ideas. As her Keystone protégé Charlie Chaplin put it, “All we needed was a park bench, a bucket of whitewash and Mabel Normand.” SENNETT WAS WELL aware how vital Normand was, and in 1913 he placed an ad in the trade papers: “Mabel Normand, leading woman with Keystone, will hereafter direct every picture in which she appears.” Roles were more fluid in the silent era, and “director” certainly didn’t imply the levels of technical expertise it does today, but it was still a remarkable thing for a 21-year-old woman to be in control on both sides of the camera. “She was inventing a new way of being a movie star,” says Stevens. “She was so interested in all aspects of filmmaking that she went beyond being just this desirable, funny woman to become a creator of her own content, in a way that was only possible — especially for women — for a very brief period.” When Chaplin arrived at Keystone in September 1913 — a veteran of stage comedy but still finding his feet in movies — Normand took him under her wing. She directed him in several capers and helped develop his iconic ‘Little Tramp’ persona, giving the character his first outing in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914). She was creating comedy history elsewhere, too. ‘Firsts’ are difficult to pinpoint in the silent era, since so many films are lost, but Normand is generally thought to be the originator of the custard-pie-in-face gag, and the first ever actor to break the fourth wall. So, not just no Chaplin without her: no Krusty The Clown or Ferris Bueller, either. The comedic fourth-wall break — later requisitioned by everyone from Oliver Hardy to Tim from The Office — became Normand’s trademark, and goes some way to explaining her popularity. With one exasperated shrug or mischievous grin to camera, she made the viewer complicit in her antics. “Audiences felt like they knew her,” says Massa. “She became known as ‘Our Mabel’.” By the time Mickey was bulldozing the box office, Normand was a bona fide megastar. Sennett had bumped her from director to studio head — opening the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company in 1916 — and she was a staple of the Hollywood gossip columns, where her hard-partying antics were legend (during one lunch, she made the excellent order of “nine martinis and a baked Alaska”). At the decade’s end, all seemed rosy: the Great War was over and Normand was slapstick’s hottest property. But behind the scenes, the wheels were coming off. Drugs, illness and scandal were all set to turn America’s Queen Of Comedy into a very public pariah. THE FIRST SEEDS of Mabel Normand’s downfall were sown one evening in September 1915. Opinions differ on exactly what happened, but the general consensus is this: the night before she was due to marry Sennett, Normand caught him in bed with her close friend, the actress Mae Busch. Tempers understandably flared, and Normand suffered a serious head injury. How is unclear: varying reports have accused Busch of hurling a vase at her, Sennett of throwing her downstairs, and even Normand of attempting suicide. What is clear is that she severed all personal ties with Sennett from then on. “She didn’t even want to speak to him,” Massa tells Empire. “She let him produce her films, but romantically there was never anything again. He set up the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company partly to stop her leaving.” It was a bold move — but unsuccessful. The two shot Mickey together in 1916 (her new studio’s only release), but Normand’s ongoing head trauma delayed its opening. By the time the film emerged, she had jumped ship to Goldwyn Pictures (later to become MGM). Massa notes that “her behaviour became more erratic after the head injury”, and her time at Goldwyn certainly bears that out. Wild drinking sessions meant she frequently arrived late on set, and when a producer reprimanded her, Normand responded by smearing the man’s jacket with lipstick and telling his wife he’d been seen leaving a brothel. Rumours of her cocaine use swirled around Hollywood, Right, top to bottom: Normand adjusts her headdress in Suzanna (1923), produced by longtime cohort Mack Sennett; Larking about in 1920’s What Happened To Rosa?; Raggedy Rose (1926), her final long-form film. Four years later she would die, aged just 37. Right: Flanked by William Colvin and Laura La Varnie in Mickey. Below: Behind the camera for 1921’s Molly O’. Bottom: Costarring with The Little Tramp again in A Fair Exchange (1914). Alamy, Capital Pictures, Eyevine, Getty Images, MPTV 92 APRIL 2023

FLORENCE LAWRENCE Dubbed “the first movie star”, this excellently named actor was among early Hollywood’s biggest draws. To promote her 1910 film The Broken Oath, studio bosses told reporters she’d died in a car crash, only to reveal her alive and well before the movie opened. Top PR-ing. ANNETTE KELLERMANN Australian Kellermann found fame in 1907 when she was arrested at a beach for the thenscandalous crime of wearing a one-piece bathing suit. She launched her own swimwear range before diving into movies, notably becoming the first-ever woman to appear nude in a Hollywood film. COLLEEN MOORE A major star of the early ’20s, most of Moore’s films are now sadly lost. Luckily, she had fingers in other pies: she became curator of a doll’s house museum, author of a book on stock-market investment and pioneer of the ‘bob’ haircut. LUPE VÉLEZ Unlike many silent-era stars, Mexico-born Vélez successfully transitioned to ‘talkies’, powering the popular ’40s comedy franchise Mexican Spitfire. A huge boxing fan, she would attend fights draped in rubies and furs, and once expressed her ire with a referee by attacking him with an umbrella. MABEL NORMAND ISN’T THE ONLY FORGOTTEN FEMALE SILENT STAR boards blacklisted her films. Meanwhile, it was around this time that tuberculosis — the disease that would eventually kill her — started to take hold. Enfeebled by illness and stained by scandal, her career sputtered to a halt. By 1927 she’d made her last film. By 1930 she was gone, aged just 37. Chaplin, Sennett and Arbuckle were pallbearers at her funeral. In Hollywood, the era of sound film (‘talkies’) had begun, and Mabel Normand was already on her way to being forgotten. The question is: why? Her untimely passing aside, how has such a pioneering figure fallen so completely off the radar? “Sexism is part of it,” Stevens says. “As Hollywood started to accrue money and power [in the mid-1910s], men began taking over the important roles.” Stevens cites a bust-up between Normand and Chaplin on 1914’s Mabel At The Wheel: the pair disagreed over a gag and Chaplin stormed off, supposedly humiliated at being out-ranked by a woman. Sennett — having received a call from Keystone financiers emphasising the Little Tramp’s value — sided with Chaplin. By the time Mabel At The Wheel came out, Sennett had assumed directing duties from Normand, and Chaplin had a deal to direct his own pictures. “Around 1916, Mabel stops directing and becomes just an actor,” says Stevens. “Maybe she thought it wasn’t worth it.” Massa suggests another theory for her faded reputation: “In 1949, a critic called James Agee wrote a famous piece about silent comedy for Life magazine, which established the ‘Big Four’: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. He didn’t talk much about Mabel, which was unfortunate. She should be up there with them. She should be remembered.” It’s hard to disagree — largely because, despite her vast influence, Normand has no modern-day equivalent. A strikingly glamorous comedy star who did her own death-defying stunts? Normand was essentially Rita Hayworth, Kristen Wiig and Tom Cruise rolled into one. “I’ve risked life, limb and peace of mind in innumerable ways,” she once said. “And all to make people laugh.” It doesn’t need to have been in vain. Most of Normand’s surviving work is up on YouTube, just waiting to be rediscovered. Have a look sometime. You’re in for a wild, funny, truly ‘Mabelescent’ ride. though it’s thought she may well have been prescribed the drug for pain relief. It was in 1921, though, that the real trouble started. That September saw Normand’s frequent co-star, ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, accused of the rape and manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe. Though he was eventually acquitted, his films were banned — meaning some of Normand’s best work disappeared, too. Five months later, a second scandal hit: the (still-unsolved) murder of William Desmond Taylor, a director friend of Normand’s, whom she’d visited at home an hour before his death. “There was never any thought that Mabel was involved in the killing,” says Massa. “Taylor was probably bumped off by drug [dealers]. But people were puzzled. They thought, ‘She’s such a good girl, how could she be caught up in this?’” It was the height of prohibition, and the press dubbed Hollywood ‘Sin City’. And ‘Our Mabel’ — the cheeky, funny girl-next-door — was suddenly linked to its most prominent sinners. A third crime — at which Normand was actually present — sounded the death knoll for her reputation. In 1924, her chauffeur shot and wounded an oil broker Normand had spent the day drinking with. The bizarre incident was leapt on by journalists, and US censor APRIL 2023 93

94 MONTH 2022 Bill Nighy, star of LIVING, on the Ikiru remake that has given him the role of his incredible career IN LIVING, OLIVER Hermanus’ transposition of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to ’50s London, Bill Nighy gives the performance of a lifetime, rightly rewarded with his first Oscar nomination, for Best Actor. He plays Mr Williams, a repressed civil servant who, diagnosed with fatal stomach cancer, finds a new passion for life, turning his attention to building a children’s playground as his parting shot. Interpreting a sensitive script by acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Nighy delivers a nuanced, extremely moving turn, as far away from Billy Mack in Love Actually (“Yes I have, Ant or Dec”) as you can get. Battling a cold and smarting from a bruising 3-0 Boxing Day defeat for his beloved Crystal Palace (he is a club patron), Nighy is, as you’d expect from a man who has pretty much secured national-treasure I N D I S P E N SA B L E H OM E E N T E RTA I N M E N T status, sparkling company, be it talking acting technique, sitting in fake blood on Shaun Of The Dead or, of course, Wilfried Zaha… Did you know Kurosawa’s Ikiru going in? No, I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never heard of it. Unlike Ishiguro or [producer] Stephen Woolley, I am not really a cinephile in that regard. I watch lots of films but I don’t watch the films you’re supposed to watch. So, I hadn’t watched it and then I did and admired it very much. But I didn’t feel oppressed by the idea of it. I suppose I should have really, but because the central performance [by Takashi Shimura], although marvellous, was very different from anything I might have done, I didn’t feel as daunted as I possibly should have done. [ EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT ]

❯ English reserve fits so well with that story… That’s it. Ishiguro came to England when he was five years old and he saw Ikiru when he was 12. It made a big impression on him because of the message of the movie, which is you can have a significant, meaningful life without having to take the world by storm. As you can tell from his books, he’s always been fascinated by reserve, the sort of extreme restraint people require of themselves, particularly during the ’50s in England. So, he always wanted to marry the ideas in Ikiru with what is called “Englishness”, but I am sure there are characters like Mr Williams in every culture. Is it true you only found a way into the character right at the last minute? I suppose it is true. I do a lot of study, which is my job — to study the lines and learn them backwards so that I can give the impression I have never said them before. That’s my gig. So, I did the usual degree of that. Then you get the costume, then you walk on the set and whatever work you’ve done is supposed to kick in. I’m not reckless in that regard, but you never quite know how the voice is going to come out when you first start, and it came out very quiet. I did think the sound man was going to come up to me at some point and say, “Bill, really? Six weeks of this? Are you serious?” But nobody said anything so I just kept going. Is it easier or harder playing a buttoneddown character than one who is much more flamboyant? I don’t know. I think buttoned-down comes easier to me than the other. All the words people use to describe me all begin with “L”. “Languid”. “Louche”. “Laidback”. “Lanky”, obviously. But I think I’m being quite lively, which also begins with “L”. I like what I call close work, what they call naturalism; of course, there is no such thing. Not that big is not natural — there are lots of big characters around — but I like it when it gets to be minimal. How did you land on that rigour in your approach to acting? Where does that come from? Fear, paranoia and not having any money for quite a long time. It is quite alarming being an ❯ Good times: Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood at the pictures in Living. APRIL 2023 95

Below, top to bottom: Civil servant Mr Williams (Nighy) with his only female employee, Margaret (Wood); Dressed for dinner; Margaret is an entrancing presence; Williams reflects. with a view to a spin-off. I don’t know if that will happen. With Love Actually, why do you think audiences responded to Billy Mack? I don’t really know, to be honest with you. I know Richard wanted the character to be the kind of person who just says what he thinks, or says what everyone else is thinking in actor. Starting jobs is the most uncomfortable part because you think this is the one where you’re going to get busted, or whatever your latest paranoia is. I just used to get the wind up going to work. My head was always out to get to me, not only about work but also in regard to other areas of my life. I just had a tendency to project negatively. Then you discover you’ve got to go to work, so what are you going to do about it? The only thing I can do about it is have a plan. So, then I got used to the idea of being able to go to work while my head was trying to sell me all kinds of undermining negative bollocks about myself. It’s like having a radio in your head tuned into one channel, and that channel is called Bad News About Yourself. Am I right in thinking your first film role was as ‘Flower Delivery Boy’ in The Bitch? Yeah, I didn’t make the screen. I don’t think so, anyway — I haven’t seen the film. My line was, “Flowers for Mrs Salmon.” I remember [the fee] was £150. It was an absolute godsend at that time. It’s funny, I don’t remember a great deal of my life because I haven’t got a very good memory. But I always remember the money. I can always tell you what I got for it. Over the years, given the scripts you’ve been sent, have you noticed a Bill Nighy type — a sense of how you are perceived? It’s hard to know how you are perceived. I religiously don’t read anything [about myself ] and I don’t watch anything. It’s very hard to know. You go through periods. When I was in my thirties, I played six journalists on the trot. Then I had a period of being a nuisance around women, with suspicious hair. If I ever catch a glimpse of anything I was in during my thirties, I always think, “Why didn’t you cut your bloody hair?” It always looked so long, but then directors would always say, “Don’t cut your hair.” It became a thing, usually because it was supposed to make you look unsavoury or morally dubious. Do you think of Love Actually as the turning point? Love Actually was the turning point. It was a big hit, especially in America, and it meant that people could put my name to my face. When you’ve been in a hit, you’ve become more castable and more visible. It also meant I didn’t have to audition anymore, which is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me professionally, for which I owe Richard Curtis everything. If you ask any actor, not having to audition would be number one on their wishlist. Funnily enough, I did audition for Arthur Christmas, but that was a specific thing. I loved the script and lobbied hard to be in it. It was a long audition. I had to really work at it and I was very happy to do it. In fact, [director] Sarah [Smith] contacted me a few months ago to do a further recording of Grandsanta lines 96 APRIL 2023

Left: Lust for life. Top to bottom: Nighy with Tom Burke in Living; As jaded rocker Billy Mack in Love Actually (2003); 2013’s About Time; Zombiefied in Shaun Of The Dead (2004); As Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006). Alamy, Landmark, Lionsgate a straightforward, refreshing way, which I suppose people responded to. We’d all like to be a bit like that. But it was a double act. It was me and Gregor Fisher, who is an assassin, just brilliant. People always like the bit at the end where we get together and I don’t go to Elton’s party. Staying with your work with Richard Curtis, is it true that About Time is the film which people stop and ask you about the most? Yeah, without question. Obviously, there’s a lot of Love Actually people. Because I don’t own a car and I walk everywhere, I meet a lot of people. About Time is now at number one in terms of films people want to talk about but they can never remember the title. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has remembered the title. Lots of young people tell me they left the cinema and phoned their dad. It’s a stayer. It’s entered the language. One bloke came up to me in the street and said, “I watched one of your films the other night.” I said, “Oh yeah?” It didn’t sound promising. He said, “I thought it was going to be a load of shit, but it turned out alright.” I knew he was talking about About Time. From the cut of his jib, I just knew he thought it would be a load of old rubbish. And then it seduced him. are inspired. I have had message after message after message saying it’s inspirational. I really want to take on board what it suggests. What are your most vivid memories of Shaun Of The Dead? I loved Shaun Of The Dead. It was one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I thought that script was absolutely wonderful. It’s inspired to make a howdo-you-get-your-girlfriend-back? movie which just happens to take place in a zombie apocalypse. From every point of view, it’s just deeply satisfactory. I didn’t know the boys at all and they were very good value. They looked after me and made me very welcome and were continuously funny. It was a very hot summer. A lot of my part was bleeding to death in the back of a Daimler in a heatwave, with a blood tube up my neck, sitting in a pool of damp fake blood. Simon [Pegg] and Nick [Frost] used to do Al Pacino impersonations; they are both very good at Al Pacino. They’d come in and give me a quick joke in Al Pacino language. Playing Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest offered a different, digital style of prosthetic. Was it a very technical process? It was another acting gig. I was put in a pair of computer pyjamas with 250 white baubles all over the place and a skull cap, then shown pictures of the scariest thing on the ocean waves. Then somebody said, “Action!” I didn’t really understand the process until I got there. It wasn’t more technical than anything else. It wasn’t like green-screen and me on my own. I was on the boats in the Bahamas. It was amazing. Ten-million-dollar galleons. Let’s end on the most important question: where are Crystal Palace going to finish in the League this season? Oh my God, now you’re talking. It’s very difficult to say. We’re very happy with Mr [Patrick] Vieira. He’s done a fantastic job and I’m very proud that he’s our manager. I love the new players that have come in. Michael Olise and Eberechi Eze are wonderful players to add to a great squad. Whether Wilfried Zaha will stay with us or not, I don’t know, but if he does not, I wish him well. He’s been a great servant to the club. If you want a specific answer, I am going to go crazy and go eighth. Really? Actually, seven is a nicer number. I’ll say seventh. IAN FREER LIVING IS OUT ON 20 FEBRUARY ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL Do you think About Time shares connective tissue with Living? Yes, I do. They both make the same suggestion. Defy your procrastinatory mind and make the most of every day. Living seems to have delivered in that regard. People who have seen it are not depressed, they APRIL 2023 97

guest shots to authentic movie stardom as Oscar, the slobbier half of The Odd Couple to Jack Lemmon’s prissy Felix. Based on a play by Neil Simon, that runaway 1968 hit led to a career as a middle-aged light-comedy lead.  A lot of things were possible in ’70s Hollywood that would be a stretch now, like jowly, growly, wrinkled, slouching Matthau becoming a romcom lead, grouching endearingly through Cactus Flower (with Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn), Pete ’N’ Tillie (with Carol Burnett) and House Calls (with Glenda Jackson). He stuck with Neil Simon for Plaza Suite, California Suite and The Sunshine Boys, and coached The Bad News Bears in 1976.  Everybody’s favourite disreputable uncle, Matthau aged disgracefully to become one of the Grumpy Old Men. But, for a three-film run in 1973 to ’74, Walter Matthau became a tough-guy action star.  And killed it. Fresh off Dirty Harry, which reinvented the cop movie and the American career of Clint Eastwood, director Don Siegel developed an adaptation of a paperback novel called The Looters by John Reese. A heist-goes-wrong thriller, it started out as a vehicle for Donald Sutherland, but Universal had a prestige release slot available and a bigger name was needed.  Matthau came in, initially unsure, and Siegel reimagined the pitch with screenwriters Howard Rodman (who’d written Siegel’s Madigan) and Dean Riesner (of Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry). Played by Sutherland, Charley Varrick might have been a long-haired drop-out at odds with an Establishment represented by the Mafia as much as the Law. The more mature Matthau became “the last of the independents”, proprietor of a failing crop-spraying business who turns to bank robbery to make ends meet. Siegel wanted to call the film ‘The Last Of The Independents’, but this was nixed by the suits at Universal, who might have seen it as a dig at them. Instead, it was named after its main character. Charley is desperate to turn his streak of bad luck around, but Matthau portrays him as cool, calculating and resolute rather than an off-thewall oddball. Played by, say, George C. Scott, you wouldn’t like him, but with Matthau you’re hugely invested in wanting him to get away with it. The first act of Charley Varrick is up there with Rififi, The League Of Gentlemen or The Wild Bunch as a great heist. After announcing “a Siegel film”, the title appears as a name stitched to the back of a burning flight suit, and we get a sunny, bucolic introduction to the folksy small town BY HIS OWN admission, Walter Matthau became a star because he had a gambling problem. Specifically, his bookie told him that if he kept losing at the rate he was, he’d get to choose whether he wanted his arms or legs broken. While he tailed off the bets, Matthau got out of the hole by taking any TV or film gig on offer and worked his way up from bit parts and Charley Varrick 98 APRIL 2023

MONTH 2022 Clockwise from far left: Bank-robber Charley (Walter Matthau) in his cunning disguise; Norman Fell on the case as Mr Garfinkle; A masked Charley hassles a bank guard; Charley and Harman (Andy Robinson) cash out. of Tres Cruces, New Mexico. Children playing.  Friendly citizens opening up businesses. Flags saluted. Outside the bank, a deputy lets a couple park where they shouldn’t, because the older man has his leg in a plaster cast. Matthau, 52 at the time, often played cranky old coots, and Charley is first seen in a grey wig and makeup, indulging in crotchety banter with his supposed daughter — actually his wife Nadine (Jacqueline Scott) — to distract the cop. When this harmless guy limps into the bank to cash a cheque, it turns out he’s an armed robber and the mood shifts. With two masked men, Charley intimidates the bank manager (Woodrow Parfrey) and gets the cash… But a deputy queries a licence plate, and everything goes south. Nadine shoots a cop in the head and is fatally wounded, but still drives the getaway car like a speed demon as she bleeds out. One of the Before we get to the next hook/surprise. When Charley opens the cash bags, expecting maybe $20,000, he finds three-quarters of a million and realises that the Tres Cruces smalltown bank is a ‘drop’ for Mafia money skimmed off gambling, drugs and vice in Las Vegas. He knows the cops will eventually give up looking for the robbers, but the Mob — represented by smooth tycoon Boyle (John Vernon) and pipesmoking, cowboy-hatted sadist Molly (Joe Don Baker), two of ’70s cinema’s best villains — never will. The film becomes an intricate puzzle as Charley — who has to cope with maniacal idiot Harman, as well as cool killer Molly — executes a plan to get away with at least his life and, with luck, some money. Though, in unspoken melancholy, he still has to do this without his wife.  When you watch Charley Varrick the second time, the intricacies of Charley’s escape plan make perfect sense, but the audience is trusted to follow them without hand-holding. Even if you’re bewildered, there’s pure pleasure to be had in the funny, edgy, sexy encounters Charley and Molly have with vivid, interesting shady characters: Mafia restauranteur Honest John (Benson Fong); passport forger Jewell (Sheree North); Boyle’s secretary/girlfriend Sybil (Felicia Farr); lewd old-lady neighbour Mrs Taft (Marjorie Bennett). The leads operate in a moral vacuum, but Siegel always finds space for innocent, appalled children at the edges of the story. This isn’t about crime without consequences. Having pulled off this caper, Matthau played a cop in The Laughing Policeman and an administrator in The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three — two more tough, flavourful, near-perfect thrillers. Then it was back to laughs for the rest of a grand career. KIM NEWMAN CHARLEY VARRICK IS OUT NOW ON DVD, Alamy, Getty Images BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL WALTER MATTHAU IN NUMBERS ↓ robbers and a bank guard are killed in the crossfire, but Harman (Andy Robinson, the psycho from Dirty Harry) gets away with the Varricks. Nadine dies but Harman doesn’t, and it’s a measure of how perfect the performances are that Charley never needs to mention that this wouldn’t have been his preference. The robbery, the shoot-out and the getaway epitomise Siegel’s cinema of action, building to an explosive punchline that ends this phase of the film… 1/10/1920 WALTER JOHN MATTHOW IS BORN ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK 1/7/2000 THE DATE HE DIED, IN SANTA MONICA, AGED 79 6357 HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD THE LOCATION OF HIS STAR ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME THE NUMBER OF FILMS IN WHICH HE STARRED WITH JACK LEMMON 3 THE NUMBER OF OSCAR NOMINATIONS HE RECEIVED 1955 THE YEAR OF HIS MOVIE DEBUT, THE KENTUCKIAN 6 THE NUMBER OF MEDALS HE WAS AWARDED WHILE SERVING IN THE US ARMY AIR FORCES DURING WORLD WAR II 1 NUMBER OF OSCARS HE WON (BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR FOR THE FORTUNE COOKIE) THE NUMBER OF 4 EPISODES OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS IN WHICH HE APPEARED 2000 THE YEAR OF HIS FINAL MOVIE, HANGING UP 10 APRIL 2023 99

From a rat to a troll, PATTON OSWALT talks us through key beats in his unique career AMONG HIS MANY accomplishments, Patton Oswalt predicted The Book Of Boba Fett. In a 2013 Parks And Rec episode, he played a pop-cultureobsessed town-hall attendee who launches into a wild (improvised by Oswalt) filibuster, predicting a project in which “the gloved, Mandalorian armour gauntlet of Boba Fett grabs on to the sand outside the Sarlacc pit and the feared bounty hunter pulls himself from the maw of the sand beast.” Eight years later, Oswalt, watching the Disney+ show, tweeted, “YOU’RE WELCOME.” His fervour for film is unmatched (see his excellent book Silver Screen Fiend), but he’s also created plenty of iconic moments himself. Here, he talks us through some milestone roles. DELMER DARION MAGNOLIA (1999) The first years of his career gave stand-up comic Oswalt all kinds of small roles in major movies: ‘Monkey Photographer’ in Zoolander, ‘Blue Collar Guy’ in Man On The Moon. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, he appears atop a tree in scuba gear. “I was doing a club called the Largo in LA and Paul used to hang out there a lot,” Oswalt recalls. “He was hanging out in the kitchen, I’d just come off stage, and he was like, ‘You want to be in a movie?’ The next day I was hanging out in a tree. It was as easy as that.” HEDGES BLADE: TRINITY (2004)    A big break (of sorts), the infamous Blade threequel had a wild shoot, with Oswalt once claiming that Wesley Snipes communicated with the director via Post-it notes signed “From Blade” (denied by Snipes). “Making that movie was a blast,” he says now. “You get to experience really cool stuff in this business and that was one of them, you know?” A comic-book enthusiast, Oswalt is excited for the imminent reboot with Mahershala Ali. “I like the darker aspects of Marvel. So if they do that kind of street-level Midnight Sons thing, I’m all in.” REMY RATATOUILLE (2007) For the past 15 years or so, when Oswalt has visited restaurants, he often gets special attention. “A lot of chefs watch Ratatouille,” he says, “so they’ll give me something special off the menu.” The Pixar classic, featuring a rat cook voiced by Oswalt, has endured, even getting riffed on by Everything Everywhere All At Once, which features hair-pulling raccoon ‘Raccacoonie’. “I had no idea that was coming,” he laughs. “When Raccacoonie showed up, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re part of the culture now...’” PAUL AUFIERO BIG FAN (2009) A hit at Sundance, this tale of an embittered New York Giants fan who’s beaten up by his hero gave Oswalt a chance to flex his dramatic muscles. “Adam [Sandler] told me he was going to do it, when it was called ‘Paul Aufiero’. And then I ended up getting it somehow. To even be considered in Adam’s league, that’s a big deal.” The shoot was cheap — “No real equipment, no real estate” — and the role demanding. “The character doesn’t really have the vocabulary or inner resources to interact with the world. Whereas I’m a comedian and try to be funny and personable. So it was just a day-today process of having to shut down that instinct.” MATT FREEHAUF YOUNG ADULT (2011) Oswalt met Jason Reitman at a dog park, where they were both walking their French bulldogs. They struck up a rapport, and Reitman invited Oswalt to read a then-uncast role at the table-read for his new film, Young Adult. “I was a placeholder, but the chemistry between Charlize [Theron] and I was so good, we just decided to go with it.” Oswalt is outstanding as a disabled old classmate of Theron’s character. “It was daunting,” he recalls. “I wanted to be really, really prepared, so I worked a long time with an acting coach and with a physical trainer, to get the limp down. This was the first film where I really broke the script down and did the work.” PIP THE TROLL ETERNALS (2021) If you weren’t deafened by the screams of Harry Styles fans at the end of this Marvel movie, you would have noticed a diminutive CG troll beside Illustration: Mike Cathro Styles’ Eros. Meet Pip. He’s kind of a big deal. “That was the first motion-capture guy I’ve ever played,” Oswalt says. “I was on a little wheelie chair next to Harry Styles. What better way to jump in?” He’s appeared in Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and voiced the title character in MODOK, but Oswalt is now fully part of the MCU; though his declaration in a recent interview that Eternals 2 is confirmed has sadly been debunked. “If there is going to be a sequel, I’ll be the last to know. I was catfished by the internet.” CHUCK I LOVE MY DAD (2022) Speaking of which, catfishing is the theme of his new film, the dark comedy I Love My Dad, about 100 APRIL 2023