Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
Amanda Seyfried let loose while making her unconventional biopic of Ann Lee, the 18th century leader of religious group, the Shakers – famous for their convulsions, dancing and vocalisation during their worship. Born in Manchester, Ann experienced visions, believed herself to be the second incarnation of Christ and was radical in her teachings. In Mona Fastvold’s film, The Testament Of Ann Lee (which was co-created with The Brutalist writer-director Brady Corbet), Lee is portrayed by Seyfried as a force of nature, inspiring followers and challenging societal norms. When she prays she and the cast dance and move while singing original Shaker hymns, grunting, keening and screaming in a kind of orgiastic ritual.
‘This did feel like an opportunity where there were just no tethers to anything,’ Seyfried told the press in Venice as the film debuted there. ‘Basically, I follow Mona into the light and anything goes because there’s so much freedom, and the only threat is to not use that freedom to your advantage as an artist to go as far deep as you can go to make the craziest sounds. I’ve never been let loose in this way.’
‘The reason I was able to face these challenges as an artist, was because I felt completely protected, held up and surrounded by loving artists, and in a place where everybody knew the value of making this, and understood Mona’s vision. I have to say it, this was incredibly rare and might never happen again.”
Unlike Ann, Seyfried admits she wasn’t always sure of herself. ‘I kept saying [to Mona], ‘go with somebody English,’ because the accent seemed so hard. But she believed in me, and so I believed in me, and here we are.’ Fastvold told journalists that her star possessed the necessary wildness to inhabit the role. ‘Amanda has a lot of power. She’s very strong, a wonderful mother, and she’s a little mad. I knew she could access those things. I saw Amanda was ready to go full force.’
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
The Testament of Ann Lee premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival Released in cinemas at a later date Amanda Seyfried wears Prada and Tiffany & Co. jewels
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
Though Benny Safdie’s Venice hit The Smashing Machine centres on the experience of real-life UFC champ Mark Kerr, the key to the story – according to the actor portraying him, Dwayne Johnson – is the relationship between Mark and his girlfriend, Dawn Staples, played with a perma-tan and acrylic nails by Emily Blunt. The bond between Johnson and Blunt is also integral to the project. It was clear to see as Greg Williams joined the duo and Safdie for a pre-premiere toast at the St. Regis before riding across the Venice lagoon to debut their work at the festival. In the Grande Salle, the film was received with a fifteen-minute standing ovation and praise for both leads’ performances.
Having become ‘best friends’ while making the action-adventure Jungle Cruise, the two actors discussed next projects, with Blunt encouraging Johnson to follow his heart and ambition in breaking out of blockbusters. When they began to work on Kerr’s biopic, Blunt admits she found Johnson’s physical and emotional transformation ‘spooky’. ‘It was one of the most extraordinary things watching him disappear completely,’ she told the press on the Lido earlier in the day. Blunt’s metamorphosis was equally impressive as she spent time with her real-life counterpart. ‘I got to know Dawn well and she was very generous with her story with me,’ Blunt said. ‘There was a deep profound love and devotion they had for each other amidst an impossible environment.’
Safdie explained the process he went through with both actors to achieve the level of authenticity he was looking for. ‘Dwayne, Emily and I kept thoughts like, ‘What is it like to really be Mark Kerr? What is it like to really be Dawn Staples?’ We wanted to empathise with these characters in a way that felt like our own feelings. I ended up calling this a kind of Radical Empathy. First, because empathy should be cool, and second, because I wanted this movie to exist as a memory for everyone who watches it.’
The film will surely live in the memory of voting bodies come awards season – with Blunt entering the conversation again for another perfectly essayed performance.
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
The Smashing Machine premiered at the Venice Film Festival Released in cinemas 3 October Read our review here Emily wears Tamara Ralph gown with Tiffany & Co. jewellery
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
When Noomi Rapace arrives at the Hotel Cipriani pool in Venice it seems she’s channeling her most recent role as nun and modern-day saint, Mother Teresa, in monochrome menswear. In Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska’s biopic, Mother, which looks as the Albanian-born nun’s pre-celebrity life in 1948 as she attempts to start a new order in Calcutta and wrestles with self-doubt and the issue of abortion, Rapace is seen wearing a black-and-white habit throughout, emoting through a wimple that she describes as ‘acting through a little hole. It’s just my face, and my body is covered’. It’s a role that required her to look at herself as well as the life of a world-famous woman. ‘I didn’t know anything about the person, just saw her with different political leaders, and Lady Di,’ she tells Hollywood Authentic. ‘And then when I got asked to play her, I started doing research. I started reading her letters. Her own words were really kind of the route into understanding her. You know what really surprised me? The eternal pain that she was carrying, and how much she was struggling with her faith, with her beliefs, with her own feeling that she was not doing enough; feeling that she was not worthy. All this self-doubt and pain. She said once, ‘If I ever become a saint, it will surely be one of darkness.’ And that’s fascinating. Also, we need to put into consideration that she’s a woman in a man’s world. She was writing letters, and calling the Vatican for years, insisting, and getting them to allow her – to give her permission – to start this vision, this mission that she had, this calling that had been given from God.’
The film explores Teresa’s inflexibility and her ambition – her single-mindedness in getting her calling accomplished. As an artist, does Rapace relate on some level to that drive and ambition that’s required to succeed in acting? ‘Yeah, the ambition and how determined she was. Coming from this small, isolated, quiet small farm in Sweden – I had no access. I had no connections. I didn’t know anyone in the world outside of the farm. I left when I was 15, and went on a journey on my own; Teresa left when she was 16, and went to join the Loreto Sisters in Ireland. I can find a connecting tissue between us in this very stubborn, determined fight for something. But also a lot of self-doubt. I’m very, very hard on myself. I grew up carrying a lot of pain, and a lot of my journey is very much to find peace, and to be accepting myself, and to forgive and be grateful, and to not be too hard. Teresa was very much ‘no exceptions – rules are for all’ – this was very much me when I was younger. You might sleep two hours, but you still go to the gym. I couldn’t understand people being like, ‘But I’m tired.’’ The actor smiles and admits to being kinder to herself these days. ‘That comes with success and aging. I love ageing. It’s been so good to me,’ she says. ‘I feel so much more at peace, and open. I think I was running away from things for many, many years, or running towards something. And now I’m really practising being in the now, and being in the moment.’
Success with films such as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Sherlock Holmes and Prometheus have also allowed her to take on films such as Mother, lending her name as well as her skills to smaller indie films and working with female directors. ‘I’ve been an actress since I was 16. I worked with so many men; amazing male directors, amazing male stars. But it’s always one woman in a group of men, and the imbalance has been shocking. How do you pave the way? How do you create a field – a stage – for women to practise their skills? I think it’s so important to make conscious choices. Because it’s so easy to take what’s in front of you, a more safe route. And when you work with a first-time director, for example, you do take a risk. So you need to step in, and be like, ‘OK, I commit to this. I’ll stand there with you. I’ll be frontline with you, and we’ll carry this together.’’
Rapace describes the robust relationship of questioning she had with her director on Mother – a freedom she says she might have labelled her a ‘difficult’ with other collaborators. ‘I’ve seen male stars coming in and being really difficult, not showing up, being late, and coming in and being really negative. And then I come in and be like, ‘I actually feel like we should look at this line, because it doesn’t really resonate with what we did yesterday’, it’s like, ‘OK, we really don’t have time for this, Noomi’,’ she laughs. ‘I mean, look at our history, women are witches. We are complicated. We are troublemakers if we come in and cause problems. But I feel a lot of hope. I feel a shift. There are such incredible female directors and producers and production companies. Look at Margot Robbie. Look at Emma Stone’s company. Female actors creating a space, and giving opportunities for other females. I get really moved by it, to be honest.’
Mother is providing space for more female stories she says; ‘It’s a feminist movie because we’re shining a light on a complex human who happens to be a woman’. It’s also an account of a pro-life woman that is pertinent to today’s erosion of female reproductive rights. ‘I was questioning Teona. I was like, ‘Why do you want to have this in it?’ She’s like, ‘Because this conversation is needed’. The fact that still today there are countries where women cannot drive, women cannot vote, women belong to the men, women cannot divorce – I mean, what the Fuck?’
For Rapace, living with the complex Teresa while filming on location in India was a draining experience. ‘We shot in the actual footsteps of Mother Teresa. We shot in the slums, the schools, in the spaces she created. I have a hard time finding words that match the feelings of what I experienced being there. But I felt like I was sort of peeling off layers and layers of myself. Towards the end, I was crying every day. It was just so beautiful to experience it – In the end, I wasn’t even entirely sure what was me, and what was Teresa. I came back to London after filming. I had two weeks, and I was so lost, walking around in my house, just in a circle like a caged animal. And then slowly I started finding my footing, and finding ground again. And then this great sensation of feeling grateful for what I’ve learned from doing this movie, and allowing this person to live in me. Even though I don’t really like or agree with her, it was a really challenging and powerful experience.’
As an actor she admits to being ‘obsessed with the human psyche’ and an advocate of therapy. ‘I’m fascinated with how we become who we are, and what tools we are given from an early age. How big is our emotional, psychological toolbox, you know? I’m a firm believer that you can go pretty fucking far in your own healing. I’m working on myself, you know? I do think that it’s important to protect yourself, but also to keep reminding yourself of “What is my journey? What am I interested in? And not what they want me to do, and not what pays me the best.’ So the moments when I close my eyes, and I listen to myself, and I can’t hear my own voice – that’s been moments that it’s like, ‘t’s time to change. I need to change something here, and redirect my life route, to start hearing my own voice again. Because it’s the only one I have’.
That voice wants to work with Andrea Arnold, Kathyn Bigalow, Tilda Swinton, Molly Manning Walker and Chloe Zhao and has taken her on projects such as Maria Martinez Bayona’s This Is The End with Rebecca Hall, which she just wrapped on. ‘I came off set every day just filled with joy,’ she enthuses. ‘It questions ‘what is life for?’ and holding onto youth.’ And she’s completed Hot Spot with Agnieszka Smoczynska. ‘She describes the movie as a poem,’ Rapace says of her director. ‘She works with sound, images, symbols. She’s a very, very special human being. We did one scene – I think maybe 20 takes – and she just kept pushing me. I felt at the end I was a sort of jellyfish. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was completely allowing her to guide me. She’s an extraordinary human. I loved it!’
Mother premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and will be released at a later date Noomi wears Ami and Messika jewels. Styling by Jonathan Huguet
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
The transformation of Dwayne Johnson into UFC champ Mark Kerr isn’t just in performance – though that’s revelatory with Johnson’s best dramatic work to date. It’s also about evolving as an actor and public figure. As he arrived at the Venice Film Festival to premiere The Smashing Machine, which he also produced, he told journalists that he’d wanted to take on a role like this for some time and that he and his director, Benny Safdie, and co-star, Emily Blunt had discussed the process for a while. Blunt, he said, had encouraged him to make the leap to such a challenging role.
“The three of us have talked for a very long time about, when you’re in Hollywood — as we all know, it had become about box office,’ the star of Fast & Furious, Jumanji and Moana said. ‘And you chase the box office, and the box office can be very loud and it can become very resounding and it can push you into a category and into a corner. This is your lane and this is what you do and this is what Hollywood wants you to do.”
‘I looked around a few years ago and I started to think, you know, am I living my dream or am I living other people’s dreams? You come to that recognition and I think you can either fall in line — ‘Well, it’s status quo, things are good, I don’t want to rock the boat’ — or go, I want to live my dreams now and do what I wanna do and tap into the stuff that I want to tap into, and have a place finally to put all this stuff that I’ve experienced in the past that I’ve shied away from.’
In the A24 film Johnson charts a three year period in Kerr’s career when he was fighting an addiction to painkillers, defining the now-huge UFC world and riding a rocky road with his girlfriend, Dawn (played by his Jungle Cruise co-star and friend, Blunt). He shows a vulnerability audiences haven’t seen from the actor before in a performance that already has awards heat. Johson brought the real Kerr to the festival with him and told the press that the process of playing the fighter had changed his life. And he thinks that the film will offer something to audiences too – not just athletes and sportspeople. ‘It’s not about the wins or the losses … it’s also a film about what happens when winning becomes the enemy. And I think we can all relate to that pressure.’
Winning might be something Johnson has to get comfortable with as we head into awards season given the glowing reviews he’s received out of the festival. The star was greeted rapturiously by crowds on the premiere red carpet after he travelled there with Greg Williams – and the film received a 15 minute ovation, reducing the actor to tears. ‘I’ve been scared to go deep and go intense and go raw until now, until I’ve had this opportunity,’ Johnson admitted. Facing the fear looks like it was worth it – it’s a knockout turn.
The Smashing Machine premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is in cinemas 3 October Dwayne Johnson wears Prada and Chopard
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
MIU MIU’S WOMEN’S TALES: FRAGMENTS FOR VENUS The last time director Alice Diop presented a film in Venice with Saint Omer in 2022 she won the Grand Jury Prize and with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award. She was also overwhelmed. ‘It actually took years to revisit that experience, and to digest it,’ she admits over tea and biscuits in the Baglioni Hotel, perched on the Grand Canal. She returned to the Venice Film Festival to serve on the First Film jury, but this year she presents her short film, Fragments for Venus as part of Miu Miu’s twice a year Women’s Tales strand. ‘This film is as important as SaintOmer. I don’t see a difference between short films, feature films, etcetera. But the stakes are lower in that this is a film that is going to live its life. It doesn’t have to make a big splash coming into the industry. So the only stress is really whether what I’ve put into the film will be heard. The moment you let your work go, there is a lot of anxiety and fear around that. I’m certainly not in the same state that I was in with Saint Omer, which I think I was actually in a state of disassociation going into that premiere. This time, I’m welcoming the pleasure and joy of presenting a film.’
Her film explores the way the Black female form has been portrayed in worlds of art throughout history, set to the powerful poem ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus’ by Robin Coste Lewis. As the stanzas list the titles of different works of art an actress (Saint Omer’s Kayije Kagame) wanders a gallery looking at the pieces. Later, the film tracks a young poet (Sephora Pondi) as she finds inspiration in the streets of Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. Both actors wear garments from Miu Miu, but that’s the only involvement the fashion house had in creating the project, says Diop, noting she’d been asked to participate numerous times but only found the time was right recently. ‘The only reason that I agreed to do this project is because there was absolutely no directive other than using some clothing from the latest Miu Miu collection. So it was an absolutely free commission. I had total freedom to create and think. It’s not enough for me to simply respond to a commission. To make a film, I need to be driven by an imperious necessity – a really strong desire. Eventually they came at a perfect moment where this film provided the ideal occasion to go further with things that I was reflecting on already.’
Diop worked with a translator, Nicholas Elliott, while on a residency in New York and it was he who found and translated Coste Lewis’ work for the writer/director. It was the title poem from her collection Voyage of the Sable Venus that particularly struck a chord. ‘It revisits the entire history of art and the construction of the gaze, and shows how the Black female body has been objectified and fetishised throughout that history. It’s a highly political poem and very experimental, but also very simple. And it truly was instrumental in inspiring this film which questions the representation of the Black female body, and of trying to use cinema as a way to repair the deformation of these images. Kayije’s beauty, her way of moving – in contrast to this great, classical, European art – creates meaning. And I hope it allows the viewer to see the way that we have been forced to accept a certain type of beauty, and exclude others. So to see her beauty in contrast with this art, interrogates the absence of certain beauties. As for Sephora Pondi, the power of her body, her beauty, her presence – it allows us to open up, and free the idea of the Venus, and to offer Sephora and all these women that we encounter in the streets of Brooklyn the opportunity to be Venuses.’
Diop has been instrumental in changing perceptions of Black women in cinema through Saint Omer – so does she feel more hopeful about the representation she is seeing in today’s art? ‘My expectation and my hope is that there will be more of us who have the means and the audience to revisit these deforming, secular visions. There aren’t many of us now. I would like for there to be more. For instance, at a major festival like the Venice Biennale, I’m not sure if there’s even one racialised filmmaker this year. There’s maybe more in the fine arts happening. Cinema still has a lot of work to do. So I’m not sure I would say that I’m confident. But, in any case, I’m hard at work, and I expect to be supported in my work by more colleagues – all of us driven by this collective effort.’ She’s currently working on a new secret project but she smiles enegmatically when asked what we might expect from it. ‘I am certainly at work, but it’s still too fragile to really talk about…’ she says as she disappears to get ready for her premiere.
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Women’s Tales: Fragments for Venus premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival Alice Diop wears Miu Miu
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Jude Law arrived on the Venice Lido to premiere his latest role as Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas‘ taut political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin and shook off suggestions that the modern-day ‘Tsar’ might not like his spot-on portrayal. He told the press. ‘I felt confident, in the hands of Olivier and the script, that this story was going to be told intelligently and with nuance and consideration. We weren’t looking for controversy for controversy’s sake.’
The film is based on Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 bestselling book by the same name, and fictionally tracks Putin’s rise to power through the eyes of a theatre director-turned TV producer-turned spin doctor, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). A created character based on real people surrounding Putin, Baranov relates his story to an American reporter visiting Moscow in 2019 (Jeffrey Wright), explaining the manipulation of Russian voters via vertical power and the background to world events (the Ukraine revolution, the sinking of the Kursk submarine, internet sabotage). Along the way Baranov betrays friends and lovers – including Tom Sturridge’s billionaire and Alicia Vikandar’s performance artist.
Law wears a wig and light prosthetics, and adopts the gait, expressions and mannerisms of Putin so that it’s difficult for audiences to tell the difference between historical footage and the actor. ‘The tricky side to me was that the public face we see gives very, very little away. There has been a term for him and that is ‘the man without a face’. There’s a mask. Understandably, Olivier would want me to portray this or that in a scene with a certain emotion, and I felt the conflict of trying to show very little.’
After The Wizard of the Kremlin premiere where the film received a 12 minute standing ovation, the actor was back to his open, real self as Greg Williams joined him on a boat heading to the AmfAR gala. At the event Law presented director Julian Schnabel with a tribute award of inspiration.
The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and will be released at a future date Jude Law wears Brunello Cucinelli
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
Greg Williams gets the need for speed when he’s invited into the paddock with the Mercedes- AMG Petronas Formula 1 team at the Bahrain and Monaco Grand Prix, shadowing team principal Toto Wolff and his drivers.
Carmen Montero Mundt is watching her boyfriend, British Formula 1 driver, George Russell, perform his pre-race warm up in his dressing room in the Mercedes garage at the Bahrain Grand Prix in April. It’s approximately an hour before the race and while principal Toto Wolff studies car and track data with the team, Russell is strength training with a neck harness for the G-force he’ll be subjecting his body to as he hurtles round the circuit at speeds of up to 230mph. He’s paying particular attention to his neck and head, which can endure 6Gs on the track. He seems quite relaxed given the baying crowds in the stadium outside and the building sense of excitement and anticipation thrumming in the garage. He’s got an ice bath waiting for him post-race, but for now his concentration is all on what’s about to come…
I have unprecedented access to all the moving parts of the Mercedes team on this blistering hot Sunday and it’s a fascinating experience. I can see why fans and teams became addicted to the hi-octane energy of the sport as the crew and wider team move like a well- oiled machine. Like a movie set, this is a company of people moving in sync and with a single-minded mission. Key to that focused drive is team principal Wolff – an exceptionally impressive man with extraordinary leadership skills where you can tell that everyone that works at Mercedes would follow him in. They follow behind him because he leads from the front with great humour and self-deprecation, and he pursues perfection and excellence in a way that very few do. ‘There is no such thing as perfection,’ Wolff smiles as I ask what perfection looks like to him. ‘It’s only the pursuit of perfection. So we’re always going to find the hair in the soup. Even if you finish first and second.’ It’s very different to my photography, where I regard perfection as the enemy of what I do, but when you’re shaving hundredths of seconds off laptimes, perfection is what you chase in F1.
There is no such thing as perfection… It’s only the pursuit of perfection
The Austrian former racing driver and billionaire is CEO and owner of a third of the Mercedes-AMG F1 team, where he has won eight consecutive World Constructors’ Championship titles and oversaw Lewis Hamilton winning six championships with the team. Wolff is fluent in English, French, Italian and Polish as well as his native German, but the language he’s most proficient in is motorsports. As he leans over monitors and converses with engineers and his drivers, Russell and 18-year-old Kimi Antonelli, he exudes an authority; a paternal, quiet calm. I have my teenage son along with me as my assistant and Wolff is incredibly warm and engaged with him despite the pressure on him in the moment. He also seems fair and kind with his team and with people’s mistakes, without being weak – a very together, impressive person. He reminds me of the command Ridley Scott has of his epic crew on set.
It’s little surprise that Wolff was sought out for advice and cameoed in recent blockbuster F1: The Movie. ‘We were involved from the early, early stages giving input and feedback on how to do the cars,’ Wolff says of the experience. ‘Then I was asked whether I wanted to do a cameo. I said yes, without really knowing whether that would happen or without knowing what it would mean. And then the filming felt horrendous for me because I was out of my comfort zone; I didn’t feel it was coming across authentic. When I saw myself onscreen it made me cringe even more. But the feedback was positive, so I’ll go with that opinion rather than my own!’ As a principal, what does Wolff make of Brad Pitt’s rebel character, Sonny Hayes, a brilliant driver who breaks all the rules? How would he deal with him? ‘Well, obviously it’s a Hollywood movie, but breaking the internal rules or not following team instructions is something that I would never believe in the team. But it was quite entertaining to watch it nevertheless.’
The drivers aren’t the only team members warming up before the race. The pit crew stretch with bands in the garage, getting ready for the incredibly physical task of prepping cars in seconds when drivers come into the box. Russell, out of his dressing room, is now totally focused and in the zone. I don’t speak to him at all at this stage of prep; it would be like trying to chat to a stunt performer before a set-piece. Russell and Wolff swap notes with the unflappable Bradley Lord, Mercedes’ trusted chief comms officer. The atmosphere is intense as the race gets underway, with applause held back until the task is completed.
When I join the team again in Monaco, I find Kimi Antonelli, the Mercedes junior driver who was given Lewis Hamilton’s seat when he left for Ferrari after 12 years. He’s taking his school exams while also placing third on the podium as one of the youngest drivers to ever do so. It’s late May and the temperatures are rising, so Antonelli wears an ice vest to keep himself cool before he departs for the drivers’ parade pre-race. Before he leaves the garage, he looks through the data with Wolff. Wolff admits that when he watches a race he’s looking at three drivers: George, Kimi and Lewis ‘because he’s still in my heart’.
When I watch both Antonelli and Russell pull on their racing suits and balaclavas just before they get in the driving seat, I see another switch in concentration. We are stepping up another gear. The noise when the cars race is astonishing. Later, when Russell returns he’s wearing a cooling jacket packed with fans that makes him look like an astronaut. Antonelli chats to his race engineer, Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington, who was previously engineer for Hamilton and has endless experience to impart to the youngest racer in Formula 1.
Experiencing the race from the paddock rather than the stadium is a unique one. I was amazed by the spotlessness of the garage (even tire marks are removed from the garage floor) and how impressive the Mercedes-AMG team are – a 58-headed monster. It gave me a new appreciation for Formula 1 and the real risks involved. It reminds me of the idea that a good movie has jeopardy and I’m now intrigued to see how the rest of Mercedes’ season goes. Wolff isn’t just looking at the season though. ‘My objectives are very long-term objectives, not for a single weekend or a single season, but trying to be contributing to setting an organisation in place that can win sustainably over the next five or 10 years,’ he says. ‘All of the decisions taken are always with a focus on that.’
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
The Now You See Me: Now You Don’t starand L’Oréal ambassador tells Hollywood Authentic about manifestation, matches and mom’s cooking.
How important is a little bit of nonsense now and then to you? It’s pretty important; nonsense is fun and allows me to take myself a little less seriously. If you ask the people closest to me they would definitely say I enjoy taking part in a bit of nonsense.
What, if anything, makes you believe in magic? If we are talking about abracadabra magic then I think the magic lives in the audience’s hope and curiosity about the trick. If we are talking about universal magic – the magic of manifestation and the stars is truly what I live by. Divine timing, paths crossing and figurative signs are all examples of magic to me.
What was your last act of true cowardice? Although I’ve gotten very close to lacking bravery, I always do it, I always go for it. I guess my last act of true cowardice was when I almost gave up on doing this big stunt. It was a battle with my own brain; I was yelling at myself in my head and did it!
What single thing do you miss most when you’re away from home? I get really homesick a lot. There are loads of things I miss but if I were to pick one I’d say my room. My bed and when my dogs hang with me, knowing my family is just a few feet away.
Do you have any odd habits or rituals? A ton. I’m very superstitious and a huge believer in manifesting. I won’t share my rituals because I feel like it would mess with their power.
What is your party trick? I don’t go to parties to show this trick, but I can put a lit match in my mouth and close my mouth over the flame then pull it out and blow the smoke. It’s fucking cool if you ask me.
What is your mantra? I have a few. ‘Everything happens for a reason’; ‘Treat people the way you want to be treated’; ‘Don’t listen to the noise.’ There’s one more but I keep that one to myself; it’s something my dad taught me.
What is your favourite smell? I love the smell of my parents’ room, my mom’s cooking, vanilla perfume (my signature scent), and my friends. Also gasoline, a Cold Stone shop right when you walk in, the small room in my house with cleaning supplies, and a campfire.
What do you always carry with you? Headphones. I need a new pair. The left side is blown out.
What is your guilty pleasure? I’m not really guilty that I like these things but I guess YouTube videos and sugar.
What would be your least favourite way to die? I’m scared of plane crashes, getting shot without seeing it coming, drowning, or if the world literally implodes. But I’m not putting any of that into the universe. No.
What’s your idea of heaven? Ever since I learned what heaven was, I pictured a soft golden abyss with flying animals and pretty angels, everyone is happy and they take turns creating the sunsets and sunrises for people still alive. That fantasy always made me feel a little more at ease about the concept of death.
New York-born Ariana Greenblatt started her career as a pre-teen in the Disney Channel comedy series Stuck in the Middle and moved to feature films with A Bad Moms Christmas, Avengers: Infinity War, In the Heights and playing America Ferrera’s unimpressed daughter in Barbie – all before turning 16. She’s played the young Ahsoka in the Disney TV show of the same name, appeared alongside Cate Blanchett in Eli Roth’s Borderlands and has completed shooting on two films set for release this year: Fear Street: Prom Queen and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (out 14 November). She lives in LA and is a L’Oréal ambassador.
*Arguably one of the most memorable (and quotable) scenes in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is when Mr Salt mumbles, ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ to which Wonka replies, in a sing-song voice, ‘A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.’
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER
The American chameleon tells Hollywood Authentic about honing his highlands accent for Harvest and the risk that drives his career.
When Caleb Landry Jones arrived at the Venice Film Festival in 2023 to promote Luc Besson’s Dogman he conducted all his press duties in a thick Scottish burr due to jetting in direct from filming Athina Rachel Tsangari’s folk-esque drama Harvest in Oban, Scotland. There he was playing Walter, a Middle-Ages Scot whose community is rocked by the arrival of a stranger. Tsangari’s English-language debut after Attenberg and Chevelier, it was filmed on location with meticulous attention to period detail and taps into themes of racism, colonialism and patriarchal oppression. When Landry Jones arrived in Venice in 2024 with the film, the accent was back to his native Texan as he took in the floating city with Greg Williams one evening and sat down with Hollywood Authentic to discuss how he inhabited a medieval man with a vastly different life experience to his own.
‘Athina wanted us all to wear clogs, because she wanted this specifically in the film,’ he laughs over a beer as he recalls the dedication to authenticity. ‘Somehow I bitched and whined enough to where I could wear boots because I was just worried I’d break an ankle. I’m from Texas, from the suburbs, and I’m used to concrete!’ Landry Jones prepped for playing a man who is at one with nature by taking long walks around Oban. ‘That was also kind of a way into the character – getting to know the land, and getting to know the environment. Because the environment plays such a pivotal role in the film. It’s one of the main characters in the film.’
The whole cast lived in close quarters, echoing the village dynamics of their characters, and Landry Jones stayed in accent for the duration of the shoot – including that trip to Venice. ‘I’m not very good at flipflopping,’ he says of maintaining his accent. ‘I worked for three months with a dialect coach, Conor Fenton, very hard. We had a very important scene and I came the day before I’m shooting that scene to Venice, knowing that the next day, we would be up on that hill, shooting that scene. So I wasn’t going to mess around with any of that, you know?’
I saw A Clockwork Orange, and that’s what started something. After I saw that movie, I started looking at life differently. I watched Fellini, Visconti, Time Bandits and Godard…
Landry Jones is known for his out-there choices – in project and performance – and he admits it’s something he leans towards when choosing people to work with. ‘I think everyone’s afraid to touch certain subject matter. I think everyone’s afraid to take chances. I think there’s a lot of fear that keeps us to some kind of performance or film that we’ve seen a million times over because we’re too afraid to go outside of that. Athina is one of the boldest filmmakers I’ve ever worked with, in this regard.’
Now living in LA, he thinks his upbringing away from Tinseltown is something that contributes to that MO and helped him latch onto the inner workings of a character like Walter, who, on paper, seems vastly different from himself. ‘Where I grew up was just outside of Dallas – Richardson, Texas. It’s a suburb next to the fire station. I could walk to the ice cream. I could walk to school. There was an aspect of knowing your neighbour, which you don’t have so much in Los Angeles, this kind of thing that I could liken to Scotland – a certain kind of humour that exists that I could liken to the Scottish humour in a way. It’s very different worlds, ways of living. But, at the end, it’s still people with beating hearts. We have these commonalities.’
‘I’ve been so fortunate with the things that have come my way. Usually the hardest thing is, you finish a film that you believe in, that you’re proud of, that you’ve had a real experience with the people who are making it, and it’s very hard to figure out: what do you do next? Where do you from here, when that was such an incredible experience? Where do you go from that? I think I’ve just been very fortunate that someone like Luc [Besson] asks me to do something so vastly different from Justin Kurzel with Nitram, and then Athina bringing me into her world, which is so vastly different from anything I’ve done before. Now I suppose I am looking for a challenge. I am looking to stretch. To play the same role again and again sounds like hell. After Get Out, the film I did with Jordan Peele, there was a bunch of people wanting me for the same kind of role in many ways. So I said no to a lot of things. And this was because I didn’t want to repeat myself in that kind of way.’
He will allow himself to repeat working with filmmakers he admires though – he’ll reteam with Besson on his interpretation of Dracula. ‘Working with someone is a kind of repetition I’ve been looking for all my life. But to play the same character again and again is something that sounds like a snoozefest. But Luc saw me as a piece of clay, and ‘what can I do with this piece of clay?’ And then he’s asked me to do something completely different than anything I’ve been asked to do before. A sword fight, and on horses, you know? It made sense to be like, ‘OK, buddy. I don’t understand why, and I don’t know where to start, but let’s start’.’
Risk, he says, is something that’s always been a part of his work and drive. ‘I had $5,000 and knew nobody,’ he says of his move to LA to pursue acting. ‘I had some kind of delusion in my head that I would succeed; that there would be no failure, and that it was impossible. I look back and go, ‘What were you thinking? You didn’t know anybody. What made you think this was going to work?’ But there was something in me. I had a little Quixote. The windmill was real, and there was a giant, and that’s what it was. Nobody was going to be able to pull me from that. And I was very fortunate to meet people that I’m still working with today. I love seeing risk and chance.’
As someone who arrived in California wanting to work with the next Lindsay Anderson, who does Landry Jones have on his list for working with next? ‘I think an agent once asked me that, and I made a list, and they were all dead. They said, ‘Caleb, this is great, but they’re all dead’. It’s not so much to work with these people, but these are the kinds of films and artists that I’m drawn to, and why I went out to Los Angeles, to begin with. At 16, I saw A Clockwork Orange, and that’s what started something. After I saw that movie, I started looking at life differently. I watched Fellini, Visconti, Time Banditsand Godard… Everybody’s very afraid of a lot of things that are happening right now in front of our faces, that we, I think, have a responsibility not to shy away from or water down.’
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS Words by JANE CROWTHER Harvestis out now in cinemas
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER
Greg Williams visits the Superman set in Atlanta as David Corenswet first suits up and later makes a flying visit to Juilliard to discuss vulnerability, confidence and his Lego plans for opening weekend.
20 February 2024
I arrive at Atlanta’s Trilith Studios on a cloudy Thursday in February to meet David Corenswet. It’s no ordinary day for the actor who was cast as Superman in the DCU’s ‘soft reboot’ of the Man Of Steel story in June 2023. There’s a palpable sense of excitement on a soundstage on day one of production as the co-CEOs of DC Studios, James Gunn and Peter Safran, await their lead dressed for the first time in his iconic suit and cape. I find Corenswet putting the final touches to his costume and hair in the make-up trailer. His hair is black with a curl hanging over his forehead and he’s wearing the latest iteration of the newly designed super suit. He’s worked out to up his muscle mass and after more than six months of prep, looks ready to embody Kal-El, the son of Krypton who lands on earth and becomes the superhero the world needs. In a bid to keep everything super secret, Corenswet wraps up in a black cotton cape to protect the suit from prying eyes as we walk across from the trailers to the soundstage and studio meeting rooms where the cast will have their first table read.
When Corenswet enters the soundstage the atmosphere is electric; Gunn and Safran are clearly stoked to see their vision come to life. I ask Corenswet how he’s feeling. ‘A little surreal. But in a good way,’ he smiles. He adopts a kneeling hero pose, and turns this way and that in front of the cameras, his red cape billowing behind him, the lights glancing off the blue of the suit. His onscreen nemesis, Nicholas Hoult, newly bald as Lex Luthor, arrives suited and booted and the actors josh with each other. ‘Are you not wearing your trunks outside your pants?’ Corenswet jokes. It’s not the first time they’ve been on a set together (Corenswet visited the set of Rebel in the Rye when Hoult was filming in 2017 as a newly graduated actor) but it’s the first time they’re worked together. ‘That’s Superman!’ Hoult whispers excitedly as Corenswet swishes past.
Two days later, back in their own clothes, the cast and crew gather in a conference room to read through the script before walking outside to take a group photo. Rachel Brosnahan (playing Lois Lane) leans against Corenswet as he crosses his arms – unconsciously mimicking the classic pose of Superman as he smiles. He’s a week away from principal photography beginning on Superman’s birthday in the comic books, 29 February. Corenswet will kick off his reign as Clark Kent/Superman filming sequences for the Fortress of Solitude in Svalbard, Norway…
5 June 2025
Fast forward 16 months and the actor is meeting me at Juilliard, the performing arts conservatory in New York. He’s travelled from his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was born and raised and now lives with his actor wife, Julia Best Warner, and baby daughter. It’s the calm before the storm. Though the Superman team have presented the movie at 2024’s San Diego Comic-Con and the teaser trailer broke records for the most views in a 24-hour period for both DC and Warner Bros, reaching over 250 million across all platforms, Corenswet is still able to go about his business in relative anonymity. On a warm June morning in Manhattan, we both know that is about to change as we stand outside the institution where his acting journey began – a place he refers to as ‘home’.
Corenswet attended the school after graduating from Penn, recalling the phone call telling him he’d made the selection as though it were yesterday. He graduated from Juilliard in 2016 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and worked on TV show House of Cards before Ryan Murphy’s The Politician and Hollywood. Though he’d appear in Affairs of State in 2018, his transfer to movies came with Look Both Ways and then playing a rakish movie theatre projectionist in Ti West’s Pearl. That led to a nebbish role as a weather-chasing scientist in blockbuster Twisters, his delightful, nerdy performance possibly a calling card for playing klutzy Daily Planet reporter and Superman alter-ego, Clark Kent.
We enter the building where staff remember him from his student days and wander through the corridors and rooms as he recalls his time here. ‘This is our main room that we hung out in, where we had our first-year scene study class,’ he says as we walk into a cavernous space with stacked chairs and a piano. ‘It’s where we did our discovery project, which is the first production you do. A lot of hours spent in this room.’ He wanders over to the piano and starts noodling with the keys. ‘One thing I would always do is I’d end up playing the piano. Because it’s a music school, they had pianos in every room. So, after hours, I would just learn specific songs. I learned this song because my classmate, J.J., sang it in singing class: “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry”.’
I was like, ‘How long do I have to keep this secret?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we have to tell people immediately. It’s going to leak. We’re telling people in an hour’
As the music echoes round the room it conjures up images of Corenswet being a fledgling actor dreaming of getting a big break, and I think back to asking him on set in Atlanta how he found out he’d succeeded in landing Superman after an intense audition process. ‘It was 27 June, 2023, at 2:30 in the afternoon,’ he’d replied, fast, of the phone call from James Gunn. Clearly a huge moment for him. ‘I was like, “How long do I have to keep this secret?” And he said, “Oh, we have to tell people immediately. It’s going to leak. We’re telling people in an hour.”’ The same week he learned he’d got Superman, he also found out that his wife, Julia, was pregnant with their first child and due a few days before production was slated to start. A massive step-change in his personal and creative life.
As we walk to another room with a stage I ask if it’s emotional now to return to Juilliard. ‘I wouldn’t describe what I feel at the moment as emotional,’ he says sitting in the audience seats. ‘I don’t feel like I’m going to cry, or like I’m overwhelmed. But I’m thinking about a lot of things. I’m remembering a lot of things. They’re very special memories.’ He looks towards the stage where a lone light is standing in the darkness. ‘This is the ghost light, by the way,’ he explains. ‘This is the thing they put in to keep the ghosts away. That’s the lore. I think it’s mostly to stop people from tripping.’
I ask what his teachers thought of him as an actor and student when he used to study and perform in these rooms. ‘That I struggled with being vulnerable. Which I don’t think was true.’ Superman is extraordinarily vulnerable, I say. ‘Well, yeah,’ he nods. ‘I think all characters have to have a certain vulnerability. One of the great things about Nick’s performance as Lex is there’s a great vulnerability underneath. That’s what gives it stakes. It’s the possibility that things could go wrong for this person. I think that’s what vulnerability is.’ He still, he says, asks a lot of questions, as he did when he studied here. At Juilliard he began to question direction to get a deeper understanding of his craft. To follow instruction without conversation is akin to ‘if anybody tells you to jump off a cliff, you jump off a cliff’. He wanted to unpack the reasoning more. ‘What you want to be able to do is say: Why this cliff? Why now? And where are we hoping I’m going to land? I just like to get clear on that.’
His questioning continued on Superman. ‘If you talk to James [Gunn], that’s the one area where I’m difficult. And very quickly, that can start to sound like an argument. It can sound argumentative to people. He gave me a note that was very much not what I thought was appropriate for the scene. And so I started going back and forth with him a little bit. To anyone watching, it would look like an argument. It looked like I didn’t want to do things the way he wanted them done. And there was one sentence that he said in the heat of it all – you know, face to face. He said one sentence, and I went, “Stop. Great. I know exactly what you mean.” I walked back off, and did the thing. And it was what he wanted. I just wanted that moment where I knew what he was talking about.’
We walk to another rehearsal room. ‘It’s smaller than I remember. But it felt like a pretty epic stage, and it’s actually quite intimate. It’s also cool because this is the same theatre that Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline, Christopher Reeve, and Robin Williams performed on.’ Reeve of course went on to be an iconic Superman in Richard Donner’s genre-defining movies, which paved the way for the superhero franchises audiences know now. ‘He was in the same rooms that I was in, and same theatre here that I performed in. He had a real playfulness about him as an actor generally. It’s funny watching interviews with him, too. He does have a nice edge about him.’
As we walk the corridors we pass the ‘wall of fame’, the photos of actors who have graduated from Juilliard’s doors. ‘We’ve got Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, right there,’ Corenswet points out. ‘Bradley Whitford was always somebody we referenced, from The West Wing and Get Out and all kinds of things. Jessica Chastain is on there. Patti LuPone is up there. Jesse J. Perez. This is Jimmy “J.J.” Jeter, who was in my class. This was like the wall of inspiration.’ He points to Adam Driver. ‘There’s Adam and his wife, Joanne [Tucker]. I just remember the day that I walked by [room] 306. The doors were closed, and you’ve got windows on the door so you can see through them. But they had set up black flats on the other side so you couldn’t see in. And on the inside, you just heard sticks slamming together. My buddy was like, “Adam Driver’s in there. He’s training for Star Wars.” I was like, “I should break in and watch.” But I didn’t.’ He finds his own name in a list. ‘There I am on the wall.’
We move onto Theatre One, a black box theatre in the complex where Corenswet did his third-year productions and the wall of fame makes me think of another conversation we had on set. Where I suggested everything would change for him. ‘No,’ he disagreed at the time. ‘It’s just a change to one’s psychology. All the change was that I didn’t have to keep looking for a different job.’ I ask him if he still feels this way.
“No. But it’s not because I was wrong at the moment. It’s because you talked to me before we filmed the movie. And before you film the movie, all you know is that you get to film the movie. Now we’re a month away from the film releasing. We’ve released two trailers and a bunch of promotional materials. Billboards are going up… I think making the movie, and sharing the movie with the world, are two different things, and will have two different effects, and will change things in different ways. Nothing’s changed for me yet, really. I got to do another movie that I wouldn’t have gotten to do if I weren’t playing Superman. And I had a really, really wonderful and meaningful experience making that movie. [He’s playing real-life NFL running back John Tuggle in Jonathan Levine’s Mr Irrelevant.] At the moment, I mean, apart from going around the world to promote the film – the next two weeks are about as similar to the two weeks before I got Superman. I’m going to be at home, hanging out with my family – you know, watching movies, or cleaning, or cooking, or fixing stuff. You know, normal stuff. And I’m looking forward to that.’
He and his wife have known each other since they did summer theatre together, growing up in Philadelphia. But as we stand in a place he graduated from nearly a decade earlier with aspirations to achieve the success he has, he knows that while his home life might not modulate, his professional life will. ‘If you asked me on 12 July [the day after the film’s release], I’d probably be having some feelings, depending on whether we’re doing very well, what the critics have said…’ He pauses, then looks back at me with a grin. ‘I have this great, big collector’s edition Millennium Falcon Lego that my wife got me as a wrap gift when I finished Superman, and it’s still sitting in my closet at home. I saw it the other day, and I thought, “Maybe that’s what I’ll do on opening weekend. I’ll just turn my phone off, and do this enormous Lego for two days.” So maybe I won’t be apprehensive then either, because I’ll be too excited about my Millennium Falcon.’ He laughs.
We’ve released two trailers and a bunch of promotional materials. Billboards are going up… I think making the movie, and sharing the movie with the world, are two different things, and will have two different effects, and will change things in different ways. Nothing’s changed for me yet, really
I ask if he had confidence in getting the job when making his self-tape for Gunn and Safran. ‘No, mostly because I saw this sort of old Hollywood humour in it, like a Fred Astaire or a Donald O’Connor or a Jimmy Stewart humour. I was excited to do that, and I thought I’d do a good job with that, but I wasn’t sure that James had intended it to be that way. So for all I knew, that was not going to be what he was looking for, and I had just seen something that wasn’t really there. So there was no confidence that I was going to be the guy for the job.’
Did he have to have confidence in embodying self-assured Superman – and in stepping onto that Atlanta soundstage on that first day in the suit? ‘I had to fake some confidence doing that,’ he admits. ‘Walking onto this big soundstage with four or five dozen people standing around – lighting and filming and standing behind monitors. I didn’t know James that well at that point. But you go through the fear of people looking at the suit or looking at your hair… I just thought for this I should probably muster up some confidence, even if it was faux-courage, and just try to be as Superman-y as I could.’
Corenswet has been mastering performance nerves for a long time, having started as the son of an actor who later became a lawyer. ‘My dad, who was an actor for many years in New York after college – theatre and background work on some things – he saw an audition notice for nine-year-old boys, and thought, ‘I’ve got one of those.’ I liked school. I liked the academics of school. But I always had this thing of like: why is this important? Doing theatre – it was much more immediate. You rehearse so that you know what you’re doing when the audience shows up, and the audience shows up because they’re paying money to see the show. I worked at a bunch of regional theatres in Philadelphia. So I was about 16. I did theatre in school, and I did a summer theatre programme – Upper Darby Summer Stage – which was a great musical theatre. I took acting quite seriously for my age, but I couldn’t really compete in the musical theatre space. I was not as good a singer, and not as good a dancer, as most of my peers.’
Nonetheless, he got into prestigious Juilliard. ‘I think getting into Juilliard was a bigger, clearer path change than when I got the role of Superman, because I was studying psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, doing theatre extracurricular-ly. I had no idea what a path forward as an actor would be, even though I was still excited by it. And when I got the call that I’d gotten into Juilliard, that was the moment when I was like, “OK, well, I’m going to be an actor – at least for a while. At least, you know, until I get really good data that I don’t belong here, I’m going to be an actor.” If you show up to school every day for four years, you’re going to figure some stuff out, and you’re going to get better. But that was, I think, a very clear split in my path of like: “OK, you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do it 100 per cent for a while.”’
His experience at Juilliard clearly paved the way for Superman in the roles he was initially assigned. ‘I was put into roles that were buttoned-up and logical; a lot of patriarchs, and a lot of first half of the 20th century young men. The first time I got to do something really crazy was in the beginning of my third year. I played a heroin addict in New York in the ’90s.’ It’s probably no surprise then that an actor who excelled at playing golden-era Hollywood young men would land Superman, a character born in 1938 in Action Comics and a hero who is known for being thoroughly good and decent. Corenswet nods as we head back out the door. ‘This is what James said about this movie: it’s about Superman, who ultimately is a guy who’s a good person, who’s trying to do his best, in a world where being a good person and doing your best is not necessarily valued.’ I’m left feeling like there’s a real correlation between the amount of views the trailer had and the fact that we all might be looking for some hope and decency in a world where that’s lacking.
Photographs and interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER Read our review of Superman Supermanis out in cinemas now
