All posts tagged: Christopher

Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott at 2026 Tony Awards Show Off Pregnancy

Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott at 2026 Tony Awards Show Off Pregnancy

Published by Daniella Wilson

The 2026 Tony Awards will be one to remember for Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott. Walking the red carpet prior to the ceremony, Plaza and Abbott posed for photos at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The couple was all smiles, wearing matching black-and-white looks, with Plaza showing off her baby bump. Sunday’s appearance marked their first red carpet arrival since People exclusively reported in April that the pair were expecting their first child. Plaza supported Abbott as he was nominated for best actor in a featured role in a play for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Unfortunately, Abbott lost the award to Alden Ehrenreich (Becky Shaw). The Tony nomination was Abbott’s first, and his other fellow nominees included Danny Burstein (Marjorie Prime), Brandon J. Dirden (Waiting for Godot), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone) and Richard Thomas (The Balusters). His co-star, Laurie Metcalf, won for best actress. While it’s unclear when The White Lotus actress and Girls star began dating, the pair previously worked together, co-starring in the 2020 …

Inside the Making of ‘The Odyssey’—With Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Christopher Nolan

Inside the Making of ‘The Odyssey’—With Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Christopher Nolan

Published by Jenni Sidey

He also knew, early on, precisely how he wanted to shoot the film. For The Odyssey, Nolan asked IMAX to design a camera that could capture not just big sweeping shots but intimate scenes of dialogue, something that was previously thought to be impossible, due to how loud IMAX cameras are. At Nolan’s behest, IMAX devised a kind of blimp covering to get the effect he wanted while still allowing the actors to hear themselves over the sound of the camera. And then, because the covering often blocked the actor’s eyeline, Nolan himself improvised a workaround, a system of mirrors that would allow a second actor’s face to be projected just left of his lens. “Chris doesn’t fake anything,” Holland told me. “Everything’s real. Everything you’re reacting to is what he wants your visceral human response to.” Pattinson once had to shoot a scene in The Odyssey responding to a far-off sound. “I can’t see anything, apart from the camera,” he recounted, “and I was just asking Chris, because I’m supposed to react to this …

Who Is Christopher Olah, the Anthropic Cofounder Welcomed by Pope Leo?

Who Is Christopher Olah, the Anthropic Cofounder Welcomed by Pope Leo?

Published by Sam Flores

Raised in Canada, Olah worked on projects related to 3D printing after receiving a Thiel Fellowship in 2012. The program, founded by conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, pays young people to work on a start-up or research project after skipping or stopping college. After finishing his two years as a Thiel fellow, Olah went on to an internship at Google, where he helped develop DeepDreams, a neural network project that created psychedelic art. At OpenAI, Olah ran an interpretability research lab, where he designed projects that helped explain what was going on as the team built its large-language model. In late 2020, he followed Amodei out of the company. On his X account, Olah frequently reposts comments from other employees who have left OpenAI, purportedly because they’re not satisfied with the company’s commitment to safety. When Anthropic was engaged in a public battle with the Department of Defense over the use of its models, Olah also reshared an amicus brief filed by Catholic moral theologians in support of Anthropic’s case. Olah is an active blogger and …

Nicolas Cage says Christopher Nolan ‘won’t call me back’ for turning down film

Nicolas Cage says Christopher Nolan ‘won’t call me back’ for turning down film

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Nicolas Cage claimed directors Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen and Paul Thomas Anderson stopped offering him projects after he turned down roles in their films. The actor said David O Russell was the only director to approach him again after a rejection. “David O Russell offered me a movie a million years ago,” Cage said on the New York Times podcast The Interview. “It was a good movie, and he offered it and I said no, and he’s the only director that I ever said no to who actually came back and offered me another movie.” Cage stars in Russell’s forthcoming film Madden, playing the late football coach and broadcaster John Madden. The drama follows Madden’s career with the Oakland Raiders, his later broadcasting success, and his involvement in the creation of the Madden NFL video game franchise. The film also stars …

The Real Lesson of Elon Musk’s Outrage at Christopher Nolan

The Real Lesson of Elon Musk’s Outrage at Christopher Nolan

Published by Sam Flores

A beautiful movie star is cast in a beloved story. The character is fictional—she isn’t even fully human. Nonetheless, activists and purists insist that the actor is the wrong race. I’m speaking of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular Japanese manga series. Critics accused the movie’s creators of “whitewashing” the heroine, a cyborg whose physical form is entirely prosthetic and whose race and gender are, in fact, mutable. She’s implanted with the consciousness of a Japanese woman, but her memories have been suppressed and edited. The story is an examination of how unstable identity is, and how untethered it can be from the body. Yet for detractors, the politics of representation—the simple fact that Johansson isn’t Asian—overrode the power of the film’s philosophical inquiry. Audiences are willing to suspend all manner of disbelief in service of a good story—except, apparently, when it comes to race. Hence the controversy surrounding this year’s most anticipated movie, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. The director cast the Kenyan Mexican actor …

The Other in the Mirror | Christopher Byrd

The Other in the Mirror | Christopher Byrd

Published by Jenni Sidey

Reading Mathias Énard, one doesn’t sense any anxiety about the fate of the novel. Although some of Énard’s narrators play Tetris or log on to social media sites, they are generally bookish to the core and enamored of high culture, their own inner worlds, and the many connections that can be made between the two. In the work of the prolific French writer, one comes to expect certain things: historical details, geopolitical thinking, elevated, sometimes baroque prose, intoxicants, violence, voluptuous solitude, troubled personal affairs, and a manifold sensuality—a zest for music, facts, literary language, the things that, to use a word he is fond of, caress the mind. Énard’s leading men are students of their own shortcomings. They’re apt to say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time and feel the abyss open beneath them. In Zone, Énard’s first book to be translated into English,1 in 2010, there is a climactic scene in which the narrator, an intelligence operative based in Paris, learns that his girlfriend—also in intelligence—is pregnant. He fixates on a …

Why Can’t Elon Musk Shut Up About Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?

Why Can’t Elon Musk Shut Up About Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?

Published by Sam Flores

Last week, in a cover story for Time, Christopher Nolan confirmed a long-circulating rumor about his upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. He said that Lupita Nyong’o does, in fact, play Helen of Troy in his film, which revisits the tale of Trojan War hero Odysseus’s 10-year journey home. Nyong’o will also play Clytemenestra, Helen’s half-sister in Greek mythology. Within hours, Elon Musk was complaining about the casting on X, the social media website he owns—and he hasn’t stopped for seven straight days. And he’s not alone. A week after Nolan confirmed the casting, the phrase “Helen of Troy” is still trending on X. Once the news became official, conservative commentators began competing to see who could be most upset about it. Matt Walsh, a podcast host on Ben Shapiro’s struggling Daily Wire, was one of the first to complain about the movie’s casting: “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave …

Christopher Nolan Interview on How Hard ‘The Odyssey’ Was to Make

Christopher Nolan Interview on How Hard ‘The Odyssey’ Was to Make

Published by Daniella Wilson

Director Christopher Nolan didn’t want to hold anything back when adapting Homer’s The Odyssey for the big screen. Talking to CBS News‘ Scott Pelley for a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday night, Nolan was asked what he believes the “essential elements” of his films are “I always try to have a point of view on the story that’s from inside the film,” he said. “So I’m not looking at the characters from 30,000 feet; I’m trying to be in the race, in the maze with them. Because I want to try and give the audience a sense of what a place would smell like, what it would feel like. But you’re also trying to make the most involving, the most extreme version of a story possible.” He told Pelley that he always approaches each film as if it were his last. “I feel a real responsibility to try and get as much on screen for the audience as possible to give the audience the fullest flavor, the fullest set of images and events that we …

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea | Christopher de Bellaigue, Daniel Drake

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea | Christopher de Bellaigue, Daniel Drake

Published by Jenni Sidey

As President Trump’s erratic negotiations with Iran drag on and oil prices continue to rise, the United States’ ostensible ethical justification for the war—regime change—has largely disappeared from mainstream coverage. In the Review’s May 28 issue, Christopher de Bellaigue argues that the US and Israel’s relentless bombing campaign has mostly succeeded in strengthening the Islamic Republic:  In the war that followed, Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists.… As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants. From 1996 until 2005 Bellaigue was a foreign correspondent for The Economist, first in Turkey and then in Iran. He has been an unofficial foreign correspondent for the Review since the spring of 1999, when he wrote a dispatch from Mumbai about the growing Hindu nationalist movement in India. …

The White House, the Warzone, and Jeffrey Epstein: Welcome to the World of Photographer Christopher Anderson

The White House, the Warzone, and Jeffrey Epstein: Welcome to the World of Photographer Christopher Anderson

Published by Sam Flores

The photographer Christopher Anderson was moving to Europe, going through storage, looking at old pictures—a familiar exercise when packing up apartments. But for Anderson, who’s been deployed to some of the thorniest places on earth, the snaps lining the cardboard box hit a little different. “I’ve lived multiple photographic lives from my origins as a war photographer, to the pictures of my family, to the pictures of the White House,” he recently told Vanity Fair. “Who was that person that was on a boat with Haitian immigrants in 2000, documenting that journey, who also then walks into Trump’s White House and photographs Stephen Miller? I hate to use the word ‘humbling’ because it’s overused, but yeah, wow—It’s hard to imagine that the kid from West Texas was fortunate enough to be present in some of those moments.” Christopher Anderson While rummaging through storage, he also found photos of Jeffrey Epstein, shot in his notorious Upper East Side townhouse, commissioned for a story that never ran. He thought he’d given the only copies to their subject …