Vince Vaughn isn’t a big fan of the direction of late night talk shows in recent years when it comes to politics.
The actor and producer made an appearance on a new episode of Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, where he criticized the programs for becoming “the same show” that are “really agenda-based.”
While Vaughn didn’t name any shows or comedians specifically, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon are some of the current late night hosts who are known to get quite political and criticize President Donald Trump on their respective shows.
“A lot of the late shows have struggled,” Von initially pointed out. “Because the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was just like white redneck kind of people. And it fucking tanked [ratings].”
The Wedding Crashers star agreed with the podcaster, adding, “See, they never get it right. The podcasts have gotten so much more popular with less production, less writers [and] less staff, because people want authenticity. And I think that the talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based.”
“They were gonna evangelize people to what they thought,” he continued, “And so people just rejected it because it didn’t feel authentic. It felt like they had an agenda. It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a fucking class I didn’t want to take.”
Vaughn attributed late night show’s declining ratings to them “all [becoming] the same show.” However, changing viewing habits and competition from digital platforms have also contributed to the significant drops in viewership.
“They all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad,” the Couples Retreat actor added. “Imagine sitting next to someone like that on a fcking plane. You’d be like, how do I get out of this fcking seat?”
Vaughn isn’t the first person in Hollywood to call out comedians for focusing too much on politics. Earlier this year, Conan O’Brien, a late night veteran, criticized comedians who have centered their jokes on being anti-Trump and leading with anger rather than comedy.
“I think some comics go the route of, ‘I’m going to just say, “F Trump” all the time,’ or that’s their comedy,” he said at an Oxford Union event. “Well, now a little bit you’re being co-opted because you’re so angry. You’ve been lulled into just saying ‘F Trump. F Trump. F Trump. Screw this guy.’ And I think you’ve now put down your best weapon, which is being funny, and you’ve exchanged it for anger.”
“Any person like that would say, ‘Well, things are too serious now. I don’t need to be funny.’ And I think, well, if you’re a comedian, you always need to be funny,” O’Brien added at the time. “You just have to find a way to channel that anger, because good art will always be a perfect weapon against power, but if you’re just screaming and you’re just angry, you’ve lost your best tool in the toolbox.”
Eric Schrier, president of Disney Television Studios, admits he was “a little hesitant” when he first heard the pitch to remake the hit FX series The Americans as The Koreans — a big-budget, local-language reimagining starring Lee Byung-hun and Han Ji-min as a pair of North Korean spies masquerading as a happily married couple in 1990s South Korea.
“I was the guy who developed The Americans,” says Schrier, who, before taking the top global TV job at Disney, served as president of FX Entertainment. “I’m still very close with Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, the originals’ creators, so I wasn’t so sure about this idea, because it’s all very near and dear to my heart.”
Schrier says he was eventually won over when he realized the unique storytelling potential that transposing The Americans’ premise to a Korean context might present. The idea to remake the show had come organically from Disney’s content relationships in Korea, rather than any top-down corporate mandate to exploit legacy IP from the studio’s libraries. It will be the company’s first local-language adaptation of one of its hit scripted series. It will boast one of the largest budgets for Disney+’s Asian originals to date.
“The similarities of the two premises — North Koreans embedded in the South, instead of Russians spying in 1980s America — started to make sense to me,” Schrier says. “But it was really the passion of our Korean team that got me excited — and I could see that, because Korea is still divided, this could be a very culturally relevant story for the local audience, which is always the primary priority for our local original content.”
Created by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg and showrun by Weisberg and Joel Fields, The Americans starred Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two KGB officers posing as a married couple in suburban Washington, D.C., during the Reagan-era Cold War. Across six seasons, the series wove espionage tradecraft into a richly layered marital drama, charting its protagonists’ deepening ambivalence about their mission — and each other — as their American-raised children grew old enough to start asking difficult questions. The show was nominated for 18 Primetime Emmy Awards and won four over its six-season run from 2013 to 2018. It regularly ranks high on critics’ lists of the best series of the platinum TV era.
Set during the wave of democratization and cultural modernization that swept across South Korea in the early 1990s, The Koreans will follow a middle-class family hiding a parallel treasonous secret. While seemingly ordinary citizens in the eyes of their friends, neighbors, and even their children, both parents — played by Lee Byung-hun and Han Ji-min — are actually elite North Korean spies working to bring down the South from within. Highlighting the stark differences between the two formerly united countries, the series will again follow the spies as they wrestle with conflicting feelings of patriotism, loyalty, identity and love, while a ruthless Korean counterintelligence agent draws ever closer to discovering their identities.
Written and adapted by Park Eun-kyo (co-writer of Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, Disney+ series Made in Korea), The Koreans is helmed by Ahn Gil-ho, the director behind the hit Netflix psychological thriller The Glory. The adaptation will be made in the typical Korean style, Disney says, employing the same writer and director for every episode, rather than the writers’ room and revolving guest director system typical of U.S. shows.
Korean star Lee Hee-joon (1987: When the Day Comes, Handsome Guys) has also been cast in an undisclosed lead role.
Carol Choi, Disney’s executive vp of content strategy and marketing in the Asia-Pacific region, posits two features of the show that have her local originals team bullish on The Koreans’ potential in both Korea and the surrounding Asian markets where Disney+ is seeking to grow: the story’s rich family dynamics and the presence of Lee Byung-hun in the lead.
“There are a lot of geopolitical spy thriller-type stories in the market now, but what got us really excited are the couple and family dynamics, and the drama and humor involved in two spies living as husband and wife while trying to bridge the ideological divide of the two Koreas — all of which will feel very relevant for the Korean audience,” Choi explains.
“And obviously, Lee Byung-hun is a big win for us,” she adds.
One of Korea’s most recognizable stars, Lee made his breakthrough in Park Chan-wook’s DMZ-set thriller Joint Security Area (2000), South Korea’s first major film to portray characters from North Korea in a sympathetic light. He later gained greater worldwide recognition as the enigmatic villain of Squid Game, and most recently turned in an irresistibly deft performance as a family man harboring dark secrets in last year’s acclaimed tragicomedy No Other Choice.
“He’s personally very interested in this role and we’re very excited about the interpretation he brings to it,” Choi adds. “It’s the type of role that will really allow him to show his stuff.”
Schrier says The Koreans is part of a planned acceleration of local-language content production in the key Asia-Pacific markets of South Korea, Japan, and Australia, with more titles in development — which is all part of a strategy, laid out by Bob Iger before he exited the top job, to bolster the competitive position of Disney+.
“We’re only interested in general entertainment with these originals — adult content,” he explains. “Our strategy is local for local, with shows that have strong appeal to these specific regions, with our unrivalled slates from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, Disney, FX, Hulu and ABC as a complement.”
Schrier says he spoke with The Americans’ stars Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, as well as the creators Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, about the Korean remake plans, and all of them gave their blessing and support.
“Joe and Joel were very curious, but chose not to be involved — for emotional reasons, I think,” he adds. “They declined to read the scripts, but they said they want to visit the sets.”
He adds: “They’re fun, curious guys — I suspect they just want to get to Korea for the first time to check out the culture and eat some Korean food.”
Tether says it will undergo its first full audit by a Big Four firm, but hasn’t disclosed which one.
The audit would verify reserves backing USDT, which the company claims total around $192 billion.
Completing the audit could help Tether comply with U.S. rules under the GENIUS Act.
Tether, the world’s top stablecoin issuer, announced Tuesday it will soon make good on a yearslong promise to audit its sprawling stablecoin reserves—but won’t yet disclose which firm will actually do the job.
Tether claims to hold some $192 billion in assets in reserve around the world to back the value of its dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDT. The majority of those reserves are purported to be held in U.S. Treasuries.
But, ever since its founding in 2014, the company has refrained from undergoing an audit from a Big Four accounting firm to confirm the accuracy of its reserve claims. It has instead relied on attestations reviewed by an Italian accounting firm that has never directly examined Tether’s accounts and holdings.
Today, the company announced it has signed a deal with a Big Four accounting firm to “complete its first full independent financial statement audit.” But Tether did not state which firm, and a Tether representative declined comment when reached by Decrypt.
The Big Four accounting firms—Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG—are the world’s largest auditors, and are widely regarded as providing a certain standard of rigor and transparency when engaged by major corporations.
Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino, told Decrypt last year he planned on putting Tether through a Big Four audit, but that the process was taking time given the company’s size.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump last summer, requires all foreign stablecoin issuers—theoretically including Tether, which is based in El Salvador—to undergo rigorous audits of its stablecoin reserves. Ardoino said last year he intends for USDT to comply with the law. A Big Four audit would go a long way to achieving that goal.
Last fall, Tether launched an American offshoot with its own, U.S.-specific stablecoin, USAT. The token launched in January, and currently boasts a far smaller market capitalization than Tether’s flagship token: just $27 million, compared to USDT’s $184 billion.
USAT’s far smaller reserves were successfully audited by Deloitte a month later.
Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to note that Tether declined comment.
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US reportedly engaged in backchannel efforts, though Israel is apparently not on the same page, and military buildup continues.
United States President Donald Trump has maintained that negotiations to end the war on Iran are under way, claiming that Tehran wanted to make a deal “so badly” despite its previous denial that talks were happening.
Speaking at the White House on Tuesday evening, Trump told reporters that the US, which joined Israel in attacking Iran at the end of last month, was talking to “the right people” to reach a deal, alluding to a “very big present” related to “oil and gas” having been gifted by Tehran.
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But, as fighting continued, including continued Iranian attacks on Israel and a strike near Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, uncertainty swirled around Trump’s claims, which had already been dismissed as “fake news” by Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, on Monday.
Trump’s latest claims coincided with media reports that Washington had sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war. Israel’s Channel 12 cited sources saying the plan would include the end of Iran’s nuclear programme and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has throttled throughout the conflict.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo said the plan had apparently been handed over to Iran by Pakistan, noting that Trump was “under pressure” about a costly and unpopular war. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Tuesday found that 61 percent of people in the US disapproved of the attacks on Iran, compared with 59 percent last week. Some 35 percent approved them, down from 37 percent in a survey conducted last week.
Behind the scenes, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged that messages had been relayed by “friendly countries” indicating a “US request for negotiations”, according to the AFP news agency.
‘Establishing deterrence, economic gains’
Negar Mortazavi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, told Al Jazeera Iran would want to end the war imposed on it on its “own terms”.
“One is to establish enough deterrence to make sure that once this war ends, it doesn’t come back like it did last year,” Mortazavi said. “That they don’t turn into the next Gaza or Lebanon or Syria, or [Benjamin] Netanyahu, potentially with US support, can go in and mow the grass, again and again,” she added, referring to the Israeli prime minister.
In addition to establishing deterrence, Mortazavi said Iran would also need “some form of economic gain”.
“This chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz is now giving them ideas. ‘Maybe we can charge passage fees like some other places in the world’ – there are those discussions in Iran”, she said, also citing sanctions relief and reparations to rebuild the country after the heavy damage inflicted by the US and Israeli attacks.
Though Trump may be seeking a diplomatic off-ramp amid soaring energy prices and a teetering global economy, Israeli military spokesman Effie Defrin said his country’s war plan was “unchanged” and that it would continue “to deepen the damage and remove existential threats”.
And in the backdrop, the US itself appeared to be readying itself for more war, with media reports suggesting that it was expected to send thousands of soldiers from the army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, adding to the 50,000 US troops already in the region, and fuelling fears of a longer conflict.
In Iran, where Trump’s comments provoked a “state of confusion and ambiguity”, according to Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, the atomic energy organisation said a strike on Tuesday evening hit inside the compound of its Bushehr nuclear power plant, but caused no damage.
In Israel, Iranian attacks on Tuesday wounded seven people, including an infant. Iran has kept up and indeed increased the pace of its launches, sending millions of Israelis into shelters multiple times a day. Recent failed interceptions have caused deaths and injuries.
It’s about to get a lot easier for creators on Facebook and Instagram to push products to their followers. Meta will now allow creators to include clickable shopping links for products directly in their Reels.
Brand partnerships and affiliate links, in which creators earn a portion of sales generated by their recommendations, are central to how creators earn money from Facebook and Instagram. But Meta has limited the ways in which they can direct their followers off-platform. As a result, creators often rely on third-party “link in bio” services for managing links to the stuff they endorse.
Now, Meta says it will allow eligible creators to link to up to 30 distinct products in a single Reel. the feature will be available on both Instagram and Facebook, though Facebook creators are limited to tagging products from marketplace partners like Amazon.
The change could be a boon for lifestyle creators and others who rely on their followers regularly buying the stuff they recommend. It brings Meta’s apps up to par with TikTok and YouTube Shorts, both of which have had affiliate shopping features for years. It will also make shopping content a lot harder to ignore, which could risk alienating some people if creators go overboard.
For Meta, the change will give it new insight into what its users are buying. A Meta spokesperson says the company isn’t taking a cut from creators’ sales via these links for now, though it’s probably safe to assume the company will use the data gleaned from them to bolster its ad business.
Robinhood has approved a new $1.5 billion share repurchase program, giving the company more than $1.1 billion of additional capacity as management signals confidence in its strategy and financial strength.
The company said it expects to execute the refreshed authorization over about three years, while keeping flexibility to move faster if market conditions allow.
The new plan builds on Robinhood’s earlier buyback efforts. The company first launched a $1 billion repurchase program in May 2024, then raised the total authorization by another $500 million in April 2025.
By February 2026, Robinhood had already spent about $910 million buying back roughly 22 million shares at an average price of $40.64, and its March 2026 investor presentation highlighted a $1.5 billion repurchase authorization as part of a broader capital allocation strategy.
The buyback arrives as crypto markets remain under pressure, a key driver of weakness for Robinhood given its reliance on digital asset trading. Bitcoin hit a record high near $126,000 in early October 2025 and was last trading near $70,000 today, reflecting a sharp decline as risk appetite unwound.
Robinhood stock has followed a similar path, hitting a record high near $154 in early October 2025 and last trading near $69 today, down about 55% from that peak.
The company reported fourth quarter 2025 crypto trading revenue of $221 million, missing analyst expectations, while its digital asset segment has faced sustained pressure since the October market downturn.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Circle shares dropped nearly 20% Tuesday, falling toward the $100 level after a CoinDesk report revealed new draft language in the CLARITY Act that would ban yield on stablecoin balances.
The proposed rules would prohibit issuers from offering passive rewards for simply holding a stablecoin and restrict structures that resemble interest-bearing deposits. While activity-based rewards may still be allowed, the framework remains unclear, according to people familiar with the draft reviewed by industry participants on Capitol Hill.
The update directly affects stablecoin issuers such as Circle. Although $USDC does not currently offer yield to holders, the restriction removes a potential future pathway for the product to evolve beyond payments into a store of value. That shift weakens the broader bull case around $USDC as a more competitive financial instrument.
Circle stock had been on a strong run before the pullback. Shares surged more than 175% from an early February low near $50 to a recent high around $135 last week. The stock was trading near $102.85 at press time following the selloff.
The draft language represents a compromise after pushback from the banking sector, which argued that yield-bearing stablecoins could function too similarly to deposits and disrupt traditional lending markets. The current proposal allows rewards tied to user activity but not balances, though details on how those programs would be structured remain unresolved.
The CLARITY Act is part of a broader effort to establish a comprehensive market structure framework for digital assets in the US. A prior version passed the House, and lawmakers are now working to align competing proposals before advancing the bill through the Senate Banking Committee.
The outcome of the legislation remains a key overhang for stablecoin issuers. If passed with the yield restriction intact, it could limit how products like $USDC compete with newer yield-bearing alternatives and shape how capital flows across the digital asset ecosystem.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Two years ago, when news anchor Huw Edwards – one of the BBC’s highest paid and best known journalists – was convicted of making indecent images of children, some believed to be as young as 7, almost the entirety of the U.K. was stunned.
Edwards, who’d spent his entire career of almost 40 years at the broadcaster by the time of his arrest, had been one of the most reliable faces on television: the man who was trusted to tell the world Queen Elizabeth II had died in September 2022.
But his arrest and conviction in 2024 had been preceded a year earlier by a strange story that appeared in the press and then disappeared almost as quickly. In July 2023 British tabloid The Sun published a scoop that an unnamed senior BBC presenter had been paying a teenager for sexual images. The rumor mill went into overdrive with numerous household names accused on social media before eventually Edwards’ wife made a statement on his behalf in which he admitted to being the perpetrator and saying he had checked into an inpatient facility on mental health grounds. The public quickly turned on The Sun for effectively outing Edwards.
Now a new drama from Paramount-owned U.K. network Channel 5, “Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards” shows that in fact the story of the teenager and the conviction for making indecent images are linked by a convicted pedophile whom Edwards knew. It was the pedophile who sent Edwards the images of children being sexually abused in exchange for monetary gifts (Edwards denied he was paying for the images) and it was the pedophile who introduced him to 17-year-old “Ryan” (Ryan’s real identity has never been revealed).
The 90-minute film is produced by Wonderhood Studios, written by Mark Burt (“The Trial”) and directed by Michael Samuels (“The Windermere Children”). “Wuthering Heights” star Martin Clunes plays Edwards.
Ahead of the show airing on Channel 5 on March 24 (it will also be available on Paramount+), Variety sat down with the network’s commissioners Guy Davies and Paul Testar to find out how – and why – they decided to bring the downfall of Huw Edwards to the small screen.
Where did the idea for the film come from?
Guy Davies: Wonderhood came to us with the idea of doing the Huw Edwards story. And then that developed into a conversation about how you do it, bearing in mind that one of the key sources can’t be identified. And I think we came around to the idea that a dramatic treatment of the story was the way to progress.
Did you approach it almost like a piece of factual content?
Davies: Well, I think in the sense that there was clearly somebody at the heart of this, the Ryan character, who was vulnerable, who was traumatized. And I think one of the great things that Wonderhood had managed to do is to keep that relationship and the duty of care to Ryan and that is the thing you do in a factual show.
Paul Testar: Mark Burt took the same approach and shared the same mentality as Wonderhood, of putting Ryan and his and his story and his perspective and his wellbeing right at the center of this story… This is such an emotional story, and one of the most important things about telling it as a drama was to convey the emotion of what this grooming experience was like for this poor boy, and Mark took that incredibly seriously.
The debacle was hugely embarrassing for the BBC, particularly the fact they continued to pay Edwards after his arrest while he was awaiting trial. Was there any consideration internally about doing this story given that the U.K.’s broadcasting scene isn’t very big?
Davies: I don’t think there was, to be honest. The story was always the story for us, about power, about grooming, about how that process happens. The BBC investigation is a confidential inquiry, we didn’t have access to that. And we didn’t want to make a drama about the BBC. We wanted to make a drama about a powerful person and how they came to be involved with a young man in this way and who abused their power. And also the other story, of Edwards’ conviction, was again not a BBC story.
Testar: I think it was quite an early editorial decision as well that this story reaches a broader audience when its focus isn’t on the BBC. Because I think as much as would interest us who work in television, it’s less likely to be of interest to the broader public. The story of how a vulnerable person is groomed by a powerful person, and what it’s like for the family of that boy as well, is something that gives the story a broader reach.
Because the story is told in that way, there might be some criticism that you’ve gone too soft on the BBC, particularly given what they knew about Edwards’ arrest months before the public became aware. What would your response be to that?
Testar: Editorially, I think it would have stuck out quite awkwardly at the point at which the arrest takes place in the drama, I think to then start, at that point, to interrogate what the BBC may or may not have known and when, I think just wouldn’t have worked in the story.
Davies: I think it’s how you create the part of the story which is about not being heard. And I think that Mark was very perceptive in using what we knew about the frustration that the family felt, particularly in Wales, when they tried to complain and found the BBC putting up all sorts of conditions as to wanting to get information about it and [so] they just went to the papers.
Testar: It’s the frustration of an ordinary person trying to navigate a complex bureaucracy.
Let’s talk about some of the legalities of making the show. First the disclaimer credit, which reads: “This drama is based on extensive interviews with the victim, his family and the journalists who revealed his story. Some scenes, characters and text messages have been dramatized.” In a post “Baby Reindeer” era, do you have to be more careful of exactly how you’re phrasing that?
Testar: I think you do have to be careful how you phrase it. And I think there isn’t a one size fits all disclaimer for every show. I think each one is dependent on the story and the and the source material. Personally, I think it’s something people were very careful about before the “Baby Reindeer” scandal.
At the end there is also a credit noting Edwards was offered the opportunity to comment and declined. Were you expecting him to make a statement?
Davies: Well, we didn’t make it as a collaboration with him, had never intended to.
Did you see the statement he put out on Monday in which he condemned the dramatization? Is there anything you’d want to add to the statement Channel 5 already put out in response?
Davies: I don’t think so. Because I think that statement is about our position, really, that [the film] was based on the research, and that ourselves as the channel, our legal team Wonderhood’s legal team, were all happy that this has been made in accordance with Ofcom and the Broadcasting Code, which I know Huw has mentioned in his statement, and that we were very clear to give all of the allegations that would be looked at in the film in ample time, when it came to the Ofcom rules, which is what we did. So I think that’s it.
He has said he is also planning to “produce his own account.” Is that something that Channel Five might be interested in?
Davies: No.
Did making the film give you any insight into why he did what he did?
Davies: I don’t think I can comment on that, you’d have to ask him. … I mean, the insight from the psychiatric reports is his explanation to a degree. But I wouldn’t want to try and interpret his psychology.
Did you pay Ryan for his life rights?
Davies: I don’t think we should talk about that to be honest. I think that any relationship we have with him, or Wonderhood has with him, to be accurate is a matter that is between them. I don’t want to get into that. I don’t think we need to expand on that. I know Huw has asked about it.
The film opens with Edwards reporting Queen Elizabeth’s death and ends with him announcing his own conviction, which was obviously a dramatic license. Why did you choose to start and end there?
Testar: It was one of the very first things that Mark reacted to in this story, which was that there is no more trusted emblem of the establishment in our society than the person who’s given the responsibility of telling the public that the Queen had died. … And also somebody who is responsible for not just the Queen’s death, but had reported many other stories and scandals and convictions.
Davies: [He was] incredibly trusted by the public, and in a way, that trust became a bit of a metaphor in the film, because that’s also about power and the abuse of power. And that’s why I think it’s such an interesting story, hopefully for viewers, because I think they will be taken aback by some of the texts, for example. The other side to that figure of trust, that’s why it’s such an interesting story to explore that idea of power and trust. Because you’ve got it there in the actual research.
Did you always know the film was going to end with him reading out his own conviction as a news reader?
Testar: It was pretty early on, but it wasn’t in the very first draft… it felt like a very important thing to end the story on, to remind the audience what the scale and detail of Edward’s crimes were.
Davies: And being, you know, finally accountable to the public in the medium which he worked in.
I remember from covering the conviction and the court case that it was such a strange thing that this guy who for so long had been the face of the news had become the news.
Testar: I think that this story and this scandal was quite a significant moment in the public’s general view of its institutional and establishment figures. I think it has contributed to a questioning of establishment figures, simply because of what the role that Edwards had and all of that. So I think that was another part of why that device was important.
When filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller first called Daniel Pemberton about Project Hail Mary, the conversation started with wood blocks. Not metaphorically — literally. The directing duo had an idea that the entire film could be scored on a single percussion instrument. Pemberton loved the spirit of it. He also told them, with his characteristic directness, that it probably wouldn’t sustain a two-and-a-half-hour film.
That exchange says something about how this particular creative partnership works. And why it keeps producing results.
Andy Weir had already proven that his brand of rigorously researched, deeply human science fiction could fill a movie theater. The Martian, his debut novel adapted by director Ridley Scott in 2015 with Matt Damon, grossed over $630 million worldwide and earned seven Academy Award nominations. When Project Hail Mary was still in manuscript form, Ryan Gosling moved quickly, acquiring the rights from Weir to star in and produce the sci-fi adaptation.
Lord and Miller, the creative duo behind The Lego Movie, the Jump Street franchise and the Spider-Verse films, came aboard to direct while Drew Goddard, who had written The Martian screenplay, returned to adapt Weir’s latest work.
Project Hail Mary follows Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher who appears in the film’s early scenes addressing his students about a fast-growing solar drainage crisis, intercut with that same teacher aboard a spacecraft light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there. Where The Martian split its narrative tension between a stranded astronaut and the team scrambling to reach him, Project Hail Mary turns that structure inward, with Grace’s returning memory serving as the mission control, gradually assembling the stakes around him. Sandra Hüller co-stars as Eva Stratt, the international project director who put Grace on the ship in the first place, while James Ortiz oversaw the puppetry for the alien Rocky, and provided the voice as well.
Pemberton was no stranger to the world of Lord and Miller, having scored both 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse for the duo as producers. He also scored their Apple TV+ genre-hopping series The Afterparty. But Project Hail Mary’s gravitational pull brought Pemberton deeper into the process than their prior collaborations. Pemberton relocated to Los Angeles, writing beside the editing suite as Lord and Miller refined their cut again and again.
A composer who has never stayed in one genre long enough to be defined by it, Pemberton spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the score’s unlikely sonic building blocks, the eight-minute cue that contains every musical idea in the film, and what to expect when he shifts from scoring the saviors of the universe to the Masters of the Universe.
Your working relationship with Phil Lord and Chris Miller has covered a lot of ground, the Spider-Verse films, The Afterparty, and more. But this is the first feature they’ve directed with you scoring. How did those early conversations go?
I got involved quite early, reading the script and writing ideas that got played on set with Ryan (Gosling). Making the score feel very organic through the prism of space meant finding ways to connect the audience to the Earth and to humanity. We recruited a bunch of school kids to Abbey Road Studios and recorded them clapping, stamping their feet, slapping things, etc. We also used voices and manipulated some electronically, trying to emulate the “making it up as you go along” spirit of the film. Ryland Grace’s improvisational techniques to save the planet is kind of the way I tried to take the score.
The choir almost sounded like you were creating your own language, and communication is such an important aspect of the film. What exactly are we hearing there?
We did a lot of experimentation early on with vocals and vocal ideas. For some of those, we built very unusual kinds of electronic instruments that gave me the power to be expressive in a way that was quite unique and hadn’t really been done. I would merge synthetic voices with real voices. I wanted something that connected Ryland and Rocky.
Because Rocky is from this other planet and his communication is different, I wanted a sound world that subconsciously would connect you to this otherworldly being and illustrate how the communication between them is so important. And how communication between all of us is incredibly important in terms of connection. There’s a thing called a cristal baschet, which is this old instrument from the ’40s and ’50s, all made of glass, that you play with water. That’s a big part of the score. We were trying to create this orchestra that was not a traditional orchestra.
Project Hail Mary
Jonathan Olley/Amazon Content Services
I’m thinking about Ryland Grace pre-mission, with his memories intact and an arguably cowardly approach to life, contrasting with the Ryland we meet at the beginning in space, with missing memories and an admirable ability to roll up his sleeves. Thematically, how did you use music to separate those two versions of him?
Ryland changes, as you know, through the movie. When Rocky starts to arrive, that element of the score also arrives. So Rocky, in the same way that he brings his own personality and outlook into the story, also brings a different sonic outlook and melodic outlook. Once they start communicating, the score actually starts going in a new direction, more of these unusual voices. Early on in the film those voices are there, but they’re sparing, then they really come to life after that first connection. We call it the “cat and mouse sequence,” the bit where Rocky’s trying to send the message to Ryland.
Ryland and Rocky’s journey into the upper atmosphere as part of their mission has an intensity that lingers in the audience’s chest. When you’re tasked with writing a cue dealing with that much emotional pressure and tension, while balancing sound design and effects, how do you find the balance?
You’re talking about the “fishing trip.” That’s a huge piece. That’s like eight minutes long and it’s quite unlike the rest of the film in some ways, in terms of its dramatic intensity. That is a great example of our intentions with the film, because that cue starts with a single wood block.
There’s nothing else at the beginning of that cue, just one wood block being hit over and over again. From that one wood block, it builds and builds and it never stops. The idea behind that is it locks the audience into this tension. And the audience might not even realize it, but they need the release of this sequence and we don’t ever give it to them, which makes it so intense. That cue has every single musical idea I put in this film. It’s got kids’ percussion, it’s got electric cello, it’s got cristal baschet, it’s got glass harmonica, it’s got orchestra, it’s got millions of weird bits of percussion.
This score has everything.
I used to joke that this film score has every single sound in it except the kitchen sink, but we do actually have that in this film. One of the earliest sounds I made was a squeaky tap. I was around a friend’s very nice, big house in the countryside, very old, very creaky pipes. I was like, “Oh my God, this is the most amazing, unusual sound.” I wanted to create a language that was very organic and water-based, so I sampled it and turned it into an instrument, because of the organic, unstable nature of that sound.
Was there a particular cue you kept tinkering with as the cut evolved?
I don’t think I’ve ever been on a film where we revisited more sequences than this movie. Every sequence in the film we revisited. I was on this film for a very, very long time. I ended up pretty much living in the edit. I went to L.A. and was writing next to the edit room for quite a long time, because it allowed us to push every idea and boundary to see what would work and what wouldn’t. One of my favorite bits, one I always felt very protective of, is when Ryland turns on the Astrophage collector on the space walk. He presses the button and then he goes into the stars with all the red. I thought it was such a beautiful visual sequence. I was like, “You’ve got to let me do something for that, because this is going to be a very powerful, cinematic IMAX moment.”
Would you say this is the most challenging score of your career, even accounting for the Spider-Verse productions?
It’s definitely the most challenging, most complicated score I think I’ve ever done. It’s interesting when you’ve got a film that is about language and communication, and the ambition in the scoring is to also create a new process with different instruments and different techniques.
That involves a huge amount of experimentation, a huge amount of failure, and a huge amount of discovering weird bits of gold. At one point I was really keen on trying to do a huge amount on steel drums, because I wanted stuff that was very organic, metal that was reflective of the spaceship. And it worked, but only to a certain level. There are tons of tests and things that got binned, but out of each of those experimentations we’d find a little nugget of gold. And that gold would go on the pile and become part of the score writing approach.
When Ryland finds out it might not be a one-way trip, the emotion plays on his face with such intensity amid the quietness, and then you marry that with score. Can you talk about the arc of that scene?
When I’m scoring a movie, if there’s an option to try and make people cry, I zero in on that moment and spend so much time trying to work out how to get it to the most effective that it can be. It’s really fascinating to see how emotions can be pulled out of an audience. You can just raise the volume a tiny bit or bring it down. You can make these tiny little tweaks and it can have a huge difference.
Is originality a north star for you when you’re looking at potential projects?
Wait until you see Masters of the Universe, which is also fantastic. It’s really going to surprise people. I’m just finishing that up at the moment, and even though it’s an IP, the director Travis Knight has been fantastic and we’ve got something really, really fun. I think it invokes the most fun you can have at a cinema.
Katy Arnander, director of programming at SXSW London, teased this year’s conference program Tuesday evening at an event at a hip bar in the uber-cool neighborhood of Shoreditch, East London, where the festival is staged. The bar’s name, Equal Parts, neatly reflected the nature of SXSW London, as outlined by Arnander.
The festival, whose second edition runs June 1-6, revealed its live music component last week, and on Thursday it’ll be the turn of its conference lineup, with speakers drawn from the worlds of business, tech, politics and the arts. The film and series program will be unveiled next week.
Its programming chiefs – Katarina Sherling, head of conference, Anna Bogutskaya, head of screen, and Adem Holness, head of music – were all present at Tuesday’s stylish shindig.
First, for the uninitiated, Arnander drew a distinction between the London festival and the original in Austin, Texas, which celebrated its 40th edition this month.
“Essentially, we’re not exactly a clone from Austin – so we haven’t transported the full Austin vibe to London, but what we have done is we’ve decided to create our own vibe here in Shoreditch,” she said.
“That means that we’re leaning very heavily locally, not only Shoreditch, but also East London and London generally, which means that our program has got this flavor, if you like, that comes through being in this part of London, which is a highly convergent part of London. We have music, screen, there’s the City of London down the road [the financial district], big business; there’s Silicon Roundabout [Old Street], tech; there’s designers, creativity, fashion and, of course, visual artists, and all of those are based heavily in this part of London.”
She added, “What we like to say is that South by Southwest provides a lens by which you can look into all of these areas that I’ve just mentioned. So, it’s not just a festival of tech, it’s not just a festival of music, it’s not just a festival of screen, not just a festival of business, but it actually transcends and transgresses all of those areas, and that’s why we’re doing it here in Shoreditch.
“It’s the kind of lens around convergence that brings the energy to the work that we do, and this creates an ecosystem around the festival, which means that our delegates have this experience that allows them to travel across the neighborhood, across our various venues, and have these different experiences.”
Looking back at last year’s edition, Arnander said that they had over 25,000 audience visitors, delegates and companies from over 86 countries, 34 venues, and over 1,000 speakers.
Speakers last year included Deepak Chopra, Jane Goodall, Idris Elba, Wyclef Jean, Nile Rodgers, Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, Asif Kapadia, Julian Lennon, Joseph Fiennes, Katharine Hamnett and Sophie Turner, and VIP guests included Tom Hiddleston, Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas, Nick Mohammed and King Charles.
Looking ahead at this year’s edition, Arnander said, “We’re doubling down on what we did last year in terms of the content that we’re leaning into, but what we discovered last year was there are areas where we’re going to lean much more deeply into. One of them that we know is very important for an event like South by Southwest is connecting, networking, putting people together. Putting people from the film industry together with the tech industry, putting people who work in AI together with fashion designers. Putting musicians together with fintech. All of these are opportunities to mix and mingle and share and create ideas.”
From listening to their audience and drawing from their learnings from last year, the programmers have zeroed in on six themes “that are pertinent and that people really want to hear about,” she said.
One theme is about “AI and the new power structure,” Arnander said. “Last year, we were all about AI. Everybody wants to know about AI. This year, we now know AI is here to stay, and we’re all using it. So we’re actually delving a little bit deeper into what that means,” she said. “What does AI mean in terms of government? What does it mean in terms of information, misinformation?”
Another theme is “living longer, living better,” Arnander said, pointing to discussions about “the development of new drugs, high-speed R&D processes with AI,” among other related topics.
Yet another theme is: “How culture can save humanity,” she said. “I think a lot of us here are connected to the cultural sector, and I think more and more culture provides us with a lens by which we can manage and cope with AI, because one will not exist without the other.”
Other themes include the importance of free speech, creativity in the algorithm age, and futurism in practice, including areas like robotics and space travel.
