Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 37A, December 13, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

One of the year’s most stomach-clenching TV moments was a scene in a hotel bathroom in which a woman is searching for sunscreen. In the season two opener of HBO’s The White Lotus, Aubrey Plaza’s clamped-shut lawyer Harper decidedly does not want to be on a couple’s trip in Sicily with her husband’s finance-bro college frenemy and his bubbly trophy wife. First off, they don’t read. Second, they’re irritatingly handsy with each other. But there she is in her suite, reluctantly handing Cameron (Theo James) a pair of swim trunks to borrow and half-heartedly accepting his gratitude that she made the trip at all, especially since, as he implies, her husband was a nerd who couldn’t pull girls back in the day. As she stands in front of her mirror…

In FX/Hulu’s The Patient, Gleeson plays Sam Fortner, a patient of therapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), whom Fortner is holding hostage in a basement where he reveals himself to be a serial killer. On his most challenging scene, Gleeson muses: “There was a scene at the end of episode five that I remember being a bit chunky. It ended up taking about 10 minutes of the episode, and it was sort of a culmination of the first half of the series.” By this time in the show, Fortner has taken another captive, Elias (Alex Rich), and is fighting the urge to kill him by engaging in therapy with Strauss. “At the end of episode five, I go to do it,” says Gleeson. “Alan wakes up and stops me on my…

On the sixth episode of The Rings of Power — the first in Amazon’s mega-budget The Lord of the Rings prequel to truly erupt in action as Adar’s rampaging orcs finally come face-to-face with Galadriel and her fresh-off-the-boat, battle-hungry Númenóreans — there are a few moments where viewers over a certain age may experience a sense of déjà vu. In one sequence, Arondir — Ismael Cruz Cordova’s extremely nimble, sharpshooting elven warrior — falls from a roof only to be cornered by a huge lumbering orc who proceeds to throw him around like a rag doll. Stunt coordinator and second unit director Vic Armstrong says he got the idea — which contrasts the quick-footed physicality of Arondir against the slower but more brutal moves of the orc — from a…

The Bear (FX/Hulu) Created by Christopher Storer, The Bear focuses on Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White). After a run as a chef at some of the best fine dining restaurants in the world, Carmy returns to take control of the family eatery after his brother’s shocking suicide. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is a neighborhood institution, but fine dining it is not. FX’s comedy is more frequently unbearably tense than it is funny, and by the end of its eight-episode first season, I felt it had turned an appealing tonal corner and found empathy for many of its characters. It’s a series sure to trigger PTSD for anybody with food service experience and paranoia for anybody worried about what’s happening at the back of their favorite greasy spoon. But…

To revive the Addams Family for Tim Burton, production designer Mark Scruton’s brief was very clear. “We were not trying to copy anything else — it’s not a sequel, it’s not a reinvention, it’s a new thing,” he says. Scruton went back to cartoonist Charles Addams’ source material to evoke Wednesday’s world and, together with Burton and an illustrator, started by sketching out mirthless Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) and bubbly Enid’s (Emma Myers) dorm room, which would set the tone for everything else. “It is a micro of everything. The difference between [boarding school] Nevermore and [the small town] Jericho is the same as between Enid and Wednesday,” Scruton explains. “The window grew from wanting to give a strong graphic bond to the fact that the two were complete opposites. I…

Horgan is not only the star of the Apple TV+ Irish series Bad Sisters, she’s one of the show’s creators and writers and its showrunner. But writing for herself doesn’t necessarily take the pressure off her when it comes to acting in those scenes. “The big part of the problem is that when you write stuff, the last thing you think about is, usually, your own performance,” she says. The show follows the Garveys, a family of five sisters, in the aftermath of the sudden and somewhat mysterious death of one of their husbands, the abusive John Paul (played by Claes Bang). In the first season’s final episode (spoilers ahead), Horgan’s character reveals that she was raped by her now-deceased brother-in-law, while one of her sisters confesses to the murder.…

In contrast to the way that their incarcerated characters in the tense Apple TV+ miniseries Black Bird circle one another over the course of several episodes, warily testing and probing in a cat-and-mouse game to determine just how much trust one can place in the other, Paul Walter Hauser and Taron Egerton recognized from the outset that they were in deep together. Indeed, the actors needed teamwork to plumb the often chilling darkness of a true-crime tale. They stand at the center of the series in their scenes together, as Egerton’s polished but convicted drug dealer Jimmy Keene seeks to shave years off his sentence by faux-befriending Hauser’s eccentric suspected serial killer Larry Hall, in hopes of learning secrets that would keep Hall behind bars. But they also needed each…

FX/Hulu’s Chicago-set restaurant dramedy The Bear has sizzled its way into the awards conversation as a frontrunner in a variety of fields, including for its lead performances from Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri. But The Bear isn’t the first series to center its narrative around food service: In 1976, Alice premiered on CBS, following its eponymous waitress as she begins a new job at a diner in Phoenix. The series was based on the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Robert Getchell, which won a lead actress Oscar for Ellen Burstyn. Getchell spun his story into a sitcom that centers on Linda Lavin’s Alice, an unemployed widow who travels from New Jersey to Los Angeles with her son to pursue a…

Bowen Yang “It was a ‘Gemini’s Twin’ sketch with Charlize Theron [far right]. I couldn’t believe that they made the set actually look like TRL, and the music video looked like a real Destiny’s Child production. It was comedy, pop culture, characters and music all rolled into one.” Chloe Fineman “I distinctly remember being obsessed with ‘Dog Show’ with Molly Shannon and Will Ferrell. It’s just a perfectly bizarre and hilarious sketch. And I always howl when I watch it — like a human, not a dog.” Mikey Day “ ‘Massive Headwound Harry’ with Dana Carvey in the titular role. So dumb and so, so wonderful.” Kenan Thompson “ ‘James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party,’ with Eddie Murphy [pictured above with Dr. Joyce Brothers].” Heidi Gardner “Eddie Murphy’s James Brown…

As the ancient elf Arondir on Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, Córdova was asked to juggle scenes of extreme, fast-paced action with moments of incredible emotional heft. “Often you see actors doing one or the other,” he explains. “I’m having to merge these two lanes of acting. My humanity wants to come up, and I want to weep.” Playing an elf, though, means displaying emotion in a completely different way from humans, even when the circumstances could not be more dire — as they are for Arondir in episodes three and four, when he’s been taken prisoner, stripped of his armor, chained up alongside humans, thinks he may have lost the love of his life and witnesses the murder of his best friend. “There is this elven way of…

Kreiling plays Amandine, the wife of James Corden’s Jamie, on Prime Video’s Mammals. At the start of the series, the couple deals with a tragic miscarriage, and during the course of the show, Jamie goes on a quest to figure out if Amandine might be carrying on an affair — or how many men she may be seeing. In the final scene of the show’s first season, however, it’s revealed that Amandine is not the only party guilty of infidelity. Kreiling recalls: “Essentially, there’s a very big final confrontation where everything we’ve seen for five and a half episodes is completely turned on its head. It’s a brutally honest scene. And I emphasize the word ‘brutal.’ It’s the type of honesty where in my own life, I only know a…

On CBS’ supernatural sitcom Ghosts, Wisocky plays Hetty Woodstone, a long-dead Victorian woman with a penchant for affronted monologues about propriety and class. In season two’s second episode, Hetty embarks on a surprising journey: discovering her sexuality via a particularly bumpy washing machine. “It’s so fun,” admits Wisocky, who adds that it was a break from the kind of moments Hetty typically has in the comedy series. “But it was challenging in that my character is often given these very long, musical aria-type speeches and is very verbal. Having a scene that’s virtually silent, in which the scene partner is an inanimate object, felt challenging for me [and] for this character.” The scene itself also required some physical skills and light foley work: “Just practically, there were some fun challenges…

Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke not only made waves on TikTok for their viral “Negroni Sbagliato” video, but also stunned onscreen as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, respectively, in HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon this year. After a rigorous audition process, the two were cast as the adult versions of their characters (the younger roles are played by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey in the first three episodes), both of whom go through a tumultuous time struggling with complicated family dynamics, lost friendships and who is the true heir to the throne. D’Arcy and Cooke spoke to THR about how they prepared for their roles, their most challenging scenes and decompressing after the show’s darkest moments. How did you get attached to the project? EMMA…