Author: rb809rb

This weekend brought yet another disturbing act of political violence. Each time, we hope it’s the last, but hovering over the act is the knowledge that it won’t be the last and the fear that it won’t be the worst.

At least, that’s how many of us feel about the tragic shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. The trolls and point-scorers feel differently. Because how that opening sentence should really read is, “Yet another disturbing act of political violence, yet another round of recriminations about whose speech was responsible and who should be shut down as a result.”

In this case, the bogeyman is a familiar one: Jimmy Kimmel, who, as both Melania Trump and Donald Trump argued Monday, should be taken off the air (again) for a joke he made last week about the potential future death of Donald Trump.

But I’d argue that eyerolling another MAGA attempt to exploit a tragedy is, while an entirely fair reaction, not the full or accurate one either. It’s possible for the right to be acting in bad faith and for the left to downplay the role of demonization and violence-normalization, not with one late-night host’s misinterpreted joke — Kimmel’s quip was, as my colleague Tony Maglio notes, essentially an old-person punchline and is being taken profoundly out of context — but a different, deeper culture of demonization. When perhaps the most popular voice on the left, Hasan Piker, tosses out thoughts like “My favorite flag? Hizbollah…it’s got an AK on it and a fucking hand holding it up” and “Empires never die quietly, and we must end the American empire,” the latter of which he didn’t even restrict to his trolling livestream but told a Yale student group this month, it becomes harder to say violence-coded provocation is just a right-wing thing.

Conservatives’ playbook of using a horrific incident as an excuse to shut down the speech they don’t like — it would have been news if the White House didn’t try to capitalize on the violence at the Hilton — is by now well-known. Less known, and more uncomfortable, is how some Democrats tend to go silent on the role normalization can play in these tragedies too. The lesson of incidents like the WHCD shooting is that the real devil isn’t the other side — it’s the framing of sides to begin with.

This is a monumental and often impossible moment for media companies, when the corporate leaders who control them have been put under unprecedented government pressure even as the rhetoric from all quarters rises to unheard-of levels. We have moved from comedians commenting on current events to becoming part of them, from entertainers anointing politicians to evolving into their antagonists. Many of us believe that taking Kimmel off the air is wrong in the specific, given who else throughout the Internet hasn’t been de-platformed for saying far worse, and troubling in the cosmic, given the suppressive benchmark this could set for the future. Using corporate tools to stop comedians from making jokes is second only in its Orwellian nightmarishness to using government tools to do the same.

And yet to say that those speakers have no reason to consider their words is to ignore both today’s realities and common sense. Anyone with a platform can influence the culture — the platforms wouldn’t be so coveted if they weren’t. When leading Democratic candidates throw caution to the wind and throw around the term fascism, comparing Donald Trump to the men who caused genocide in Europe, it gets harder to say that only one side is upping the rhetoric. When a Saturday Night Live comic says, “I think that’s cool that the president is going to the theater. I mean — what’s the worst that could happen?,” as Michael Che recently did, then it’s totally reasonable to react with, “Yeah, he shouldn’t have said that” (and also, “Surely, there was a better joke about Trump going to the Kennedy Center?”). And if you’re a Democrat shrugging it off with, “Eh, it’s just a punchline,” imagine your reaction to near-misses on Barack Obama’s life sandwiched around Tucker Carlson saying the same thing.

In such a climate, should late-night hosts not make any joke at all about dead presidents? Should executives allow such jokes to pass through? I don’t know the answer. (The latter seemed to be a yes when Disney, under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, and NBC Universal, under leader Michael Cavanagh, each, mindfully or otherwise, greenlit the quips.) But it is clear that at least in these cases, performers and executives, admittedly in tricky situations, tended to the permissive. And so what was once out of bounds — I could be wrong but, re Che specifically, I don’t recall assassination jokes being tossed out on modern network television before — continued to move within the Pale, and a scourge went on afflicting politicians and groypers and, yes, comedians alike.

Sure, the White House in this case could be cynically exploiting a painful situation.  But also dangerous speech and potentially consequent acts of violence can come from anywhere, including the left; both things can be true. If you believe Melissa Hortman could be assassinated because of what the right has been saying, can’t someone plan violence against Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump because of what the left has been saying? Of course they can. It’s just easier to pretend otherwise, or pretend it isn’t all part of the same dangerous team-sport game that got us into this mess. As Jon Stewart said after Kirk, “We are treated in the aftermath of these horrific crimes to the news media’s active politicized scavenger hunt. Which piece of inconclusive arcana proves which half of the country is to blame?” The syndrome of demonizing-rhetoric is bad no matter who is doing the rhetoricizing (and no matter who did it first and who does it worst, which you’d have to be deceitful or naive to say isn’t MAGA).

Because the problem of course isn’t that one political ideology embraces violent rhetoric more than the other, even though of course at any given historical moment that can by definition be true; the problem is that in 2020s America, a culture of provocateur one-upmanship, algorithmic outrage, a mental-health crisis and the partisanship of the football field being transferred to the political arena has created the perfect conditions for this type of violence to flourish. And as misguided and dangerous as it would be to think that canceling Jimmy Kimmel will stop it, it would be equally misguided to think that just ignoring the problem will make it go away. Or to think that only side is contributing to it.

Now, there is a very, very big difference between words that may indirectly foster violence and policies that directly carry them out, and calling out a person sensationally is not the same as shooting them in the streets, full stop. I hear you, my fellow liberals, as you start typing out a comment to this effect. But we’re not talking about comparing words to policies. We’re talking about comparing words to words.

Comments like Che’s and Piker’s may not fall under a fire-in-a-crowded-theater legal definition, as certain right-wing trolls want to suggest. But that is not the only standard by which we live our lives. There’s a lot we wouldn’t want someone to say to inflame a jittery situation even if it’s fully legal. No matter how much so many us love and believe in edgy comedy, a line exists between cutting satire and violence-normalizing, and maybe stay wary of anyone who tries to use the bogeyman of repression to erase it.

In light of all this, what can any of us, from the biggest executive or entertainer to the most common citizen, actually do? At risk of depressing you, nothing. But also everything. Not enact policies or lash out with punishment but just pay individual heed to the conditions as they exist now and make the decisions our own conscience tells us to make (a personal-responsibility calculus you’d think, incidentally, Republicans would prefer).

In the end I think we’ll get to a good place (optimism!), if only because the political system will, by its counter-cyclical nature, ultimately (after too much pain) produce a candidate who galvanizes with the possibility of unity and common goals. 

In this regard, our media-entertainment industrial complex is actually leading the way, with Project Hail Mary and the Artemis coverage and the little hopecore movement currently blossoming. When it comes to media moments that bring the country together, a space mission has a much better track record than either a comedian’s joke or cancellation.

[This story contains spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.]

Jack Reynor is of two minds about the new ending to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. 

For starters, he’s honored to join the list of actors who’ve played the Mummy — a lineage that began with Boris Karloff’s iconic archetype in 1932’s The Mummy. He also recognizes that by trading places with his character’s mummified teenage daughter, Charlie Cannon is solving one problem but creating another for his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and two other kids. This downbeat ending didn’t quite land with test audiences, resulting in a more crowd-pleasing coda via additional photography. 

Instead of ending on Charlie’s ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his 17-year-old daughter Katie, his mummified self is wheeled into a prison cell where the Magician (Hayat Kamille) is being held. The latter is the party responsible for abducting Katie eight years earlier and transferring an ancient demon into her. The movie then ends with the implication that Charlie will regift the demon to the Magician so his family can be properly reformed.

“You make these decisions because you want to give the audience what they want, and I understand that. Is it a better movie, objectively speaking? I don’t know. I did like Lee’s original ending,” Reynor tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But I also understand that if I went to see that movie with my teenage kids and they were bummed out because it was so fucking bleak at the end, maybe I’d be [more in favor of the coda]. So I see the merits of both for different reasons.”

It’s been a busy couple years for the Irish actor. On May 6, he’ll be seen in the Priyanka Chopra-Jonas-led Citadel season two as a roguish former CIA operative. Then Power Ballad, his fourth collaboration with Irish director John Carney, hits theaters a few weeks later. He plays the agent to a boy bander portrayed by Chopra-Jonas’ other half, Nick Jonas. Additionally, he has an undated Gareth Evans actioner, A Colt Is My Passport, in the pipeline, as well as the second season of Presumed Innocent. Rachel Brosnahan plays his defendant character’s attorney.

The second season of Apple TV’s hit anthology series tackles new source material and bears no connection to the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring first season. But Reynor insists that it’s still going to scratch the same itch as season one.

“I wouldn’t say it’s night-and-day different. I would say that the visual aesthetic and tone of the show definitely resonates with the first season,” Reynor says. “The interpersonal dynamics of season two are different to season one, but it is certainly not such a huge departure that people are going to be feeling they’re watching a different show.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Reynor also compares The Mummy’s filming experience to his first horror movie, Ari Aster’s Midsommar, before revealing which genre movie he’d reimagine next if given the choice.

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After filming a few notable movies and a couple high-profile series, what’s your 30,000-foot view right now, career-wise? 

As time has gone on, my perspectives have changed about my career. My ambitions have changed, and I’m feeling pretty good about things right now. I really enjoy my work. Some things hit, some things don’t. But I tend to work with really great people and often really nice people too. So I always find that it’s a pleasure to go to work, and I’m very blessed that the work I do subsidizes the lifestyle that I want to have, which is very important to me. So I’m feeling pretty good about it. 

The industry is obviously changing so quickly, and we don’t really know what the complexion of it is going to be in the next five years with regard to theatrical, streaming, et cetera. If I can, I would love to continue making feature films because my love is in features, but I also really enjoy doing these limited series. Jumping into something for one season, it’s kind of like making a long movie. I like telling a complete story from end to end before moving on to something else. I’m not really somebody who enjoys coming back to things a second or third time. I think it’s just the nature of my desire to tell a lot of different stories rather than tell the same story at length.

As an Irishman, it must have been pretty special to make a Warner Bros. movie in Ireland with an Irish director (Lee Cronin’s The Mummy).

It was pretty wild, man. We all felt very proud of the fact that we were an Irish team from the ground up. The vast majority of the people who worked on that movie are friends of mine, and I’ve worked with them before on features throughout the last 15 years of my career. Even my wife, Madeline [Mulqueen], was the stills photographer. So we were all very proud of the fact that we were being given an opportunity to take a swing at something that was very ambitious and hopefully a really fun theater experience. It’s also wonderful to wake up in your own bed in the morning.

Lee is just such a wonderful director and such a great guy and such an easy guy to get behind because he loves doing it so much. That’s not always the case. I’ve worked for directors who were jaded or entitled, and it’s very hard to be excited to work for people like that. But it’s easy to be excited to work for Lee Cronin because he just fucking loves it, man.

(Spoiler Warning.) Genre fans will forever remember you as the “bad boyfriend” in Ari Aster’s Midsommar, and while Charlie Cannon has his flaws, did you appreciate the chance to be a more sympathetic figure in your return to horror? 

Yeah, but in the back of my mind, there was always this sense that Charlie is not convinced he’s cut out to be a father. That was the driving thought for me with the character. At the end, he makes the ultimate sacrifice of his own life to save his daughter, and he basically becomes the mummy instead of her. So you could look at that through the lens of it being a selfless act of love and sacrifice for his child. 

On the other hand, this is a guy who’s just spent the last eight years being so tortured by the sense that he should never have been a father in the first place. His sacrifice is almost like a respite for him: Okay, cool. I’m going to be the Mummy now, but I’m not going to have to deal with this family shit anymore. Whether people interpret that or not in the film, that was always an interesting idea in the back of my mind.

In the characters that I play, I always like to find shades of both sides of the argument. It keeps your characters dynamic. I’m always looking to play characters who read as really unsympathetic on the page, but then there’s something human and relatable to them that the audience can feel some kind of kinship with, even if it’s just through humor.

(Spoiler Warning.) There’s a scene where Charlie cruelly says that his wife shares the blame for Katie’s disappearance. She was abducted on his watch, but the Magician had been using chocolate bars to groom Katie for quite a while. He immediately apologized, but it didn’t mean much to Larissa in the moment. Did you ever view his ultimate sacrifice as a grand apology to his wife and daughter?

I did, but I’ve never settled on one side of the argument or the other. I’m comfortable on the fence. It is a grand apology. It is a taking of accountability. It is a gesture of healing basically between them, but at the same time, the manifestation of that action almost leaves her in as difficult a situation as she was in before. It’s like, You’re going to get your daughter back, but now you’re going to lose your husband. You’re still going to have this thing to deal with. So he’s leaving her in dire straits. He might be making the situation a little bit better or different, but there’s two arguments to be made on that one.

(Spoiler Warning.) Lee told me that the film was originally going to end on your character’s sacrifice, and then test screenings informed him that he needed to give the audience a pick-me-up. That became the moment of comeuppance for the Magician where mummified Charlie will presumably transfer the demon to her. Did you have to go back months later to add that scene? 

Yeah, we came back and picked it up, which was cool because it was the one day where I actually got to be the Mummy. It’s fun to get into the makeup and get to be part of that legacy. The Boris Karloff of it all is so iconic for me, especially The Mummy’s (1932) opening shot of him in the coffin. Christopher Lee’s 1959 movie is so iconic as well, so it was just sick. It was so cool to get to do that even just for one day.

(Spoiler Warning.) It sounds like you agreed with the choice to end on a slightly more crowd-pleasing note.

You make these decisions because you want to give the audience what they want, and I understand that. Is it a better movie, objectively speaking? I don’t know. I did like Lee’s original ending. But I also understand that if I went to see that movie with my teenage kids and they were bummed out because it was so fucking bleak at the end, maybe I’d be [more in favor of the new ending]. So I get it both ways. I see the merits of both for different reasons.

In terms of the vibe on set, how would you compare the most unsettling day on The Mummy versus the most unsettling day on Midsommar?

They’re two very different kinds of films. There were technical struggles and difficulties and shit that we needed to overcome on The Mummy. We were working to the bone trying to get it in the can, but it never felt like torture. There were times on Midsommar where it was torture. There’s no doubt about it for a multitude of reasons. The conditions that we were shooting in were very difficult. We were making what I think should have been a $30 million movie for $10 million. It was a masterclass in shoving ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag every day. 

We had a multilingual crew on The Mummy, but on Midsommar, there was a Hungarian component of the crew and cast. There was also an English-speaking component of the crew and cast, and then there was also a Swedish component. So anything that had to be done needed to be communicated to all departments in all languages. And when you’re under a lot of time constraints and your budget is really forcing you up against the wall, that’s difficult. So there were days on Midsommar when people were very, very on edge in a very different way to The Mummy.

Both films allowed you to master the art of the “WTF” face where your eyes widen and jaw drops. Perhaps you only deploy it on camera, but do the people in your life ever catch you making it?

(Laughs.) That’s a good question. I think my wife definitely sees me doing that from time to time, although it’s definitely embellished for the moments in the films. I don’t see much in real life that shocks me as much as the shit I see in the movies I make. Gormless is probably an adjective that my wife might use to describe that face, so I certainly mimic it in real life. 

Your fourth go-round with John Carney, Power Ballad, hits theaters at the end of May. Is it now a foregone conclusion that he’s going to include you in whatever he does? Or do you not take anything for granted? 

I never take any job I’m doing for granted, ever. I feel very lucky on every single job that I’m on. But it’s great to have the opportunity to work with the same people again and again. The longest streak for me is four times with John, and I feel really blessed. I’ve worked with Ben Wheatley three times now. We did one film together, which was Free Fire, and then we shot two seasons of a show [Strange Angel] together, which was great. Joe Russo and I have worked together twice, and it’s the same thing with Stanley Tucci. 

I’m just really lucky to get to go back and work with the same people. It’s helpful and a great comfort when you have a relationship and a shorthand already with the director or with another actor. You don’t need to go through all the rigmarole of explaining why you’re doing this or that. You can get straight to the point, which is brilliant.

I’m amazed that John still finds new ways to tell music-related stories. You play the agent of Nick Jonas’ boy-band character. Did you pull anything from the reps in your own life? 

Yeah, totally. All you have to do is walk into the lobby of WME and look around for five minutes. You’ll get a sense of what the tone is, and it’s the same thing with CAA. It’s a fun movie, and I’m definitely playing someone who is a little bit of a cipher of an agent. I love taking the piss out of my own agents a little bit.

You met John on Sing Street, and that’s also where you first worked with Lucy Boynton. Did you just reunite on a Gareth Evans movie? 

That’s right. We just did a remake of a great Japanese gangster film that I love called A Colt Is My Passport. I had wanted to work with Gareth since I saw The Raid in 2011. I actually went to see it at the cinema with Lenny Abrahamson after we wrapped What Richard Did, and we were both blown away by that movie. We both loved it. So I’ve always had a huge ambition to work with Gareth. 

And just as I was finishing up The Mummy, he came to me with an offer to play this character who’s kind of like Alain Delon in Le Samouraï or Le Cercle Rouge. He’s this real cold-blooded hitman from North Carolina. The movie takes place in ‘70s Detroit, and we literally had such a blast making that movie. It’s just gunfight after gunfight. 

Gareth is a really impressive director. He crafts the whole thing in such a way that he’s dropping shots into a timeline as we’re shooting a sequence. So by the time you finish the day of work, you’re watching an assembly of the entire action sequence that you’ve just shot, which is incredible.

Did Citadel season two’s action serve as a nice warm-up for the insanity of Gareth’s choreography? 

Totally. Citadel greased the wheels for what was to become a bit of an action-heavy year for me. I definitely loved working with Wolfgang Stegemann on Citadel. He’s a wonderful stunt coordinator, and I just had the best time with those guys. We did some pretty impressive stuff. There were some long oners that I really enjoyed, so I was definitely confident going into Gareth’s movie. By the way, there was plenty of stunty stuff going on in The Mummy as well. It’s a little more low-key, but it’s definitely there.

The Russos made the Citadel call to you since you worked together on Cherry, and it’s known for being a massive-budget show. Did it feel as substantial as any movie set you’ve been on to date? 

Yeah, in terms of scale, it’s comparable to the Transformers movie that I did years ago, but that was still a different beast. So much goes into those Transformers movies that is marketing-driven. There’s the cars from GM and the U.S. military equipment and all that shit. So that wasn’t the case with Citadel, but you could certainly feel that there was a pretty serious budget behind it. We put the money on the screen too. The show feels big and broad. It feels like a real international spy show.

When you worked with Nick Jonas on Power Ballad, did he know that you were about to go work with Priyanka Chopra-Jonas on Citadel season two?

Yeah, he knew that I was going to go and do it. But I didn’t actually meet Priyanka until we started Citadel. I love those guys, man. Nick, Priyanka and their daughter, Malti, are a really nice family. They’re just cool people. Again, it’s fun when you come off one job, and then you see the same people on the next job just through their relationship.

You just wrapped Presumed Innocent season two. It’s an adaptation of Jo Murray’s Dissection of a Murder, and it has no relation to the previous season or its source material. Rachel Brosnahan is defending your character. Is it night-and-day different from season one?

I wouldn’t say it’s night-and-day different. I would say that the visual aesthetic and tone of the show definitely resonates with the first season. The interpersonal dynamics of season two are different to season one, but it is certainly not such a huge departure that people are going to be feeling they’re watching a different show.

Rachel went straight from Presumed Innocent to Man of Tomorrow, and while it’s a champagne problem, it must be tough to not have a breather between projects. Have you ever experienced the whiplash of leaving one set on a Friday and joining a new one on a Monday? 

I actually went from The Mummy on Saturday to Colt on Monday. It was intense. I’ve done that a couple of times, and it’s never fun. It leaves you feeling a little overexposed to have to shed one character and assume another one so quickly. But Rachel has played her character before, so she’s already got her feet under the table in that way. She’s also brilliant, so I don’t think she’s going to have any problems.

The internet says you were on a list for Matt Reeves’ The Batman a few years ago. Do you think it was nothing more than a list of actors in a certain age group?

I never heard anything beyond seeing that article that you mentioned.

If James Gunn asked you to read for the Batman on his side of the DC Universe, would you still take a crack at it? Or does that type of opportunity no longer interest you?

Yeah, of course I’d show up to read. To go back to the 30,000-foot-view of the landscape, you have to just do things in good faith. You have to explore stuff. If it works out and it feels like the right thing, then do it. But you can’t be afraid to engage with something just because it doesn’t feel like it’s a hundred percent the thing that you need to do. If you’re an actor, you do it because you enjoy acting. So if you’re sent a request to tape for something, do it and enjoy the exercise of doing the tape. See how good you can make the tape just to make a good tape. Don’t worry about the fucking job. Figure that piece out later down the line. But it’s good to engage. The industry likes to know that people are engaged, and it’s good to be gracious about the work.

If you had green light power for a day, would you use it to launch a film to write and direct? Or would you use it to star in a dream project? 

There’s a 1997 movie by Kiyoshi Kurosawa called Cure. It’s a hell of a movie. If there’s one thing that I could do — regardless of how it was going to be received critically or commercially — I would love to do something like that movie. That film is just a cinematic masterpiece. It’s like Seven in many ways, but I think I prefer it to Seven. 

Wow.

Yeah. You don’t see much of that stuff getting made anymore, man. So I’d like to make something that feels like that cinematic masterpiece. It jumps around in tone. It’s a neo-noir, but it’s also a supernatural film. The craft in that film is flawless on every level.

Would you want to star in it? Or write and direct it? 

I’d want to star in it. I don’t think there’s a magic bullet in terms of writing and directing something. I think you just have to do the hard work. Part of the exercise is in working your bollocks off to get somebody to say yes to it. If I had the magic wand to write and direct something, I’d be too scared to just do it. It needs to go through the machine a little bit.

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is now playing in theaters. Citadel season two premieres May 6, while Power Ballad hits theaters on May 29.