Those same rules could apply to late-night comedy’s approach to tackling Trump 2.0. Just over seven months in, Trump’s threats have already spurred a flurry of corporate parents to ante up large sums of money to settle lawsuits many experts deemed frivolous (higher body count), Stephen Colbert was fired from “The Late Show” mere days after blasting Paramount for paying the president (more elaborate death scene) and a scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein’s client list that would have ended any other president’s tenure continues to be carefully brushed aside by Trump allies in power (don’t assume the killer is dead).

When Trump was initially elected in 2016, late night comedy wasted no time finding humor throughout his first term in office.

But how do you make him funny again? And what happens when the stakes of those jokes now include potentially losing your job?

The questions hang over this year’s talk-show and scripted-variety Emmy nominees: Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and “The Daily Show” hosts and correspondents in the former category, John Oliver and the “Saturday Night Live” writers and performers in the latter.

Late night comics like Colbert, Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers and “The Daily Show’s” Desi Lydic and Jordan Klepper (the last three of them nominated in the short-form or hosted nonfiction categories) were mixing standard zingers with more pointed critiques throughout the first few months of Trump’s second term, but the heat got turned way up when, in mid-July, Colbert abruptly announced that CBS would be ending “The Late Show” in May 2026.

The announcement came only two days after the show had been nominated for its eighth consecutive talk-show Emmy. While the network said the decision was “purely financial,” the timing raised more than a few eyebrows: The axing came just after Paramount settled its “60 Minutes” lawsuit with the president for $16 million, thus paving the way for Trump-friendly FCC commissioner Brendan Carr to finally approve Skydance’s acquisition of the company one week later.

Stewart went scorched earth on “The Daily Show” the Monday after the decision was made, but — as he so often does — eloquently connected this isolated event to a larger problem looming over the country.

“If you’re trying to figure out why Stephen’s show is ending, I don’t think the answer can be found in some smoking-gun email or phone call from Trump to CBS executives or in CBS’s QuickBooks spreadsheets on the financial health of late night,” Stewart said. “I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment, institutions that have chosen not to fight the vengeful and vindictive actions of our pubic-hair-doodling commander in chief.”

The same night, Colbert told Trump, “Go fuck yourself” and once again called Paramount’s settlement a bribe. Later in the episode, every New York-based late-night host made a cameo appearance on “The Late Show” in a touching proof of solidarity.

So late night has chosen to fight back, but it comes at a perilous time for the medium as the decline of linear viewership has hit these shows particularly hard. Six years ago, the average audience for Colbert’s show was 3.81 million, according to Nielsen. By the second quarter of 2025, it was 2.4 million. During that same period, average viewership has dropped 13% for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and 51% for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Ad revenue has experienced a downturn as well.

The dwindling numbers come despite robust social and YouTube performances for many of these brands, but that reach doesn’t make up for the traditional ad dollars lost. Intangibles like brand ambassadorship and viral moments have kept the shows afloat and continue to provide value to their corporate owners. Still, as major corporations bend the knee to Trump after he lashes out at anyone who dares to poke fun, late night comedians find themselves quite literally sticking their necks out.

Evidence of the format’s decline can also be seen in the Emmy nominations themselves. The Television Academy bases the number of nominees in most categories on the number of programs that have qualified in that category, with 20 eligible shows being the baseline that guarantees a full slate of five nominees.

This year, though, Outstanding Talk Series had only 13 programs that qualified, reducing the category’s number of nominees to three, the lowest ever. Outstanding Scripted Variety Series, meanwhile, had just eight entries, giving it two nominees for the fourth time in the past five years. Emmy rules suggest that a category with so few entries should be dropped or combined with another one, but a 2021 decision to merge the talk and sketch categories met widespread criticism. The separate categories were restored before that year’s voting even began.

Now that late night comedy’s uncertain standing at the Emmys has been joined by increasing political pressure, its hosts are aware that they are on shaky ground.

“We’re very clear-eyed about the world we’re living in. We also see these canaries in the coal mine,” Meyers, nominated for his “Late Night With Seth Meyers” short-form YouTube spinoff “Corrections,” told TheWrap prior to the Colbert cancellation. “I don’t feel as though ‘Late Night’ is a quieter voice than it was 10 years ago. I think, ultimately, there are challenges to make it as valuable a property. But we’re not doing our show and thinking we’re just yelling into a void. We feel very heard, and I would prefer that to anything.”

That voice has changed a bit in Trump’s second term, and Meyers admitted that his show — which found its stride and received its first talk-show Emmy nomination as it leaned into politics during Trump’s first term — has needed to pivot.

“We had to shift from sort of this fist-shaking, ‘This isn’t who we are!’ to finding comedy in the fact that this is who we are, and we have to figure out how to be something else,” he said.

Indeed, Colbert, Stewart, Meyers, Kimmel and even Fallon to a degree have all developed a somewhat sharper edge when it comes to their Trump jokes this time around, and they’ve defiantly stayed the course in the wake of Colbert’s axing.

Stewart, again, put it best in that post-cancellation “Daily Show” monologue when he made a direct address to the companies that own the late-night shows.

“Shows that say something, shows that take a stand, shows that are unafraid…” are what made the corporations money, he said. “If you believe — as corporations or as networks — you can make yourselves so innocuous that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar…Why will anyone watch you? And you are fucking wrong.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Late Night Comedy Discovers the Dangers of Resistance Under Trump 2.0 appeared first on TheWrap.

No, Hiller genuinely had no reason to believe he’d earn a supporting-actor nod for HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere.” His name was near the bottom of most awards prognosticators’ prediction lists, if it even appeared at all. So on July 15, the longtime character actor used to playing what he calls the “bitchy customer-service agent” wasn’t watching the Television Academy’s live feed or monitoring social media with butterflies in his stomach.

He was at home in New York City, chatting with his sister on the phone. When his agent kept calling, he wondered if it was about a role in a Fox series he’d recently auditioned for. “I was like, ‘Did I get it? Am I the gay restaurant owner?’” he said, referencing another familiar role. He figured he’d call his agent back. But then his manager rang, and in a panic, Hiller thought he’d missed a call time on an Apple TV+ series shooting in Boston. “I was like, ‘Am I supposed to be there right now?!?’

“I mean, it’s bonkers,” he said in an office in downtown Manhattan following a photo shoot for TheWrap. “I keep saying that. It’s not even about, do I think I’m worthy of it or deserve it? It’s just…I can’t believe it.” He pauses for the tiniest of beats before adding, with a rip-roaring laugh, “People who are reading about it are like, ‘We don’t care, girl! We don’t care that you’re having a moment!’”

As becomes clear during the course of our conversation, this kind of self-deprecation is par for the course with Hiller, who in person is open and unassuming, despite his 6-foot-5 stature. But the truth is, people do care that he beat the odds and was nominated for his work on a treasure of a show that, over three seasons, amassed heaps of critical praise, a Peabody Award and a modest but loyal viewership.

I used to be a social worker taking care of people who were experiencing homelessness. And now I’m like, ‘How’s my hair?’

Hiller’s character, Joel, is a church-going gay man living in Manhattan, Kansas, adrift in middle age until he befriends Sam, an acquaintance from high school played by exec producer Bridget Everett, whose life loosely inspired the series. With the lightest of touches and a fly-on-the-wall realism, “Somebody Somewhere” explores grief, loneliness, faith and community. The soulmate friendship between Joel and Sam is the show’s emotional center, and Hiller, who auditioned for the role while he was making ends meet through cater-waiter gigs and temp jobs, brings what could have been a one-note gay sidekick to vibrant, three-dimensional life.

It helped that he understood who Joel was from the moment he read the first script, written by series co-creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen. “In the pilot, he talks about how he goes to church, and he’s also clearly gay,” said Hiller, 49. “And I thought, Oh my God. Because it takes a lot of nuance to discuss that and show that. In popular culture, gay and the church, they don’t mix. But when you are in the Midwest, you see lots of queer folks who find community in the church. I grew up in the church and I knew a lot of queer folks who found community (there). So I thought that was amazing.”

The similarities between actor and character didn’t end there: Like Joel, Hiller had a vision board featuring a Vitamix, got stress rashes as a kid and drove a Buick LeSabre in his 20s. The part was not written specifically for him, but as the cast settled into their roles, Bos and Thureen encouraged improvisation “just to make it more authentic and more real,” Hiller said. “And I really found freedom in that. After Season 1, they were all like, ‘the Joel giggle!’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? The Joel…?’ And then I was like, ‘I think that’s just me.’” The distinctive giggle then rippled out of him like sonic ribbon candy.

What makes the surprise Emmy nomination even sweeter is that it came while Hiller was promoting his memoir, “Actress of a Certain Age,” an upbeat, witty read that chronicles the bullying he endured as a kid in San Antonio, Texas; his mother’s unconditional support; his stint as a social worker in Colorado; his discovery of improv at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade; and his two-decade struggle to be a working actor. He talks about the joy of making “Somebody Somewhere” and how the series helped him land bigger parts, including the “gay serial killer” he played in the 2022 season of Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story.” As does “Somebody Somewhere,” the book leans into the importance of not giving up on yourself.

“When I turned 40, I did have this moment where I was like, ‘I need to go to grad school. I need to do something,’ because I gave up hope of becoming an actor,” he said. “I mean, I was working, like, two days a year on acting. It was embarrassing. I was afraid that it would be pitiful if I was middle-aged and still following my dream. And so when I wrote the book, I wanted to say…” He stops as his voice shakes and his eyes well up. “It’s not pitiful to believe in yourself. I think I did still have hope and I was embarrassed to still have that hope. But I stuck with it. And I’m glad I did.” Then comes the trademark self-deprecation: “It feels a little selfish. I used to be a social worker taking care of people who were experiencing homelessness. And now I’m like, ‘How’s my hair?’”

Still, for the first time since “Somebody Somewhere” ended after last year’s Season 3, Hiller has been allowing himself to feel more than a little optimistic about what’s ahead. There’s the supporting role in the series shooting in Boston that he can’t talk about in detail yet, and he’s pitching shows that he’s written. He’d love to go back to Broadway, where he appeared in “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” 15 years ago — but “in a play, not a musical,” he said, “because musicals are hard. It’s the dancing. I’m too old!”

He is looking forward to attending the Emmys in September with his husband, visual artist Neil Goldberg, as well as Everett, Bos and Thureen, who were nominated for writing. He would love to meet Pedro Pascal and RuPaul there. And his formalwear? “You know, I’m a bit of a fashion plate,” he said jokingly. “I do like dressing up, so I want to wear something just shy of ridiculous. Nobody’s going to look at me and be like, ‘Who’s that straight person?’ They’re gonna be like, ‘Wow, that homosexual is walking the carpet.’” He flashes the wide, warm smile that helped make Joel such a beloved character. “I want that.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘Somebody Somewhere’ Star Jeff Hiller Is Still Getting Used to Being an Emmy Nominee: ‘I Mean, It’s Bonkers’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Going against “The Daily Show,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “Saturday Night Live” is the Season 17 “Drag Race” episode “RDR Live” — which just happened to be an improv-comedy challenge/”SNL” send-up.

“There’s an aspect that’s just very over-the-top, a lot of innuendo, a lot of
humor that’s exaggerated. I think the writers have a lot of fun with that,” production designer Jen Chu told TheWrap of parodying the NBC late-night staple. “There aren’t a lot of [‘Drag Race’] episodes where you get to do four or five sets within one episode. Usually it’s just one stand-alone set, so as a designer, it’s fun to get a script that has a lot of components. We get to do some heavy set decorating, we get to do some scenery construction and we have to turn it over really fast.”

How fast? “Sometimes they’re like, ‘How much turnover time do you need? Thirty minutes? Can you do it in five?’” Chu said. “It’s not quite as fast-paced as ‘Saturday Night Live.’ But even though we’re not on live, we’re still always really challenging ourselves to make the shoot day similar to live TV.”

The nominated episode featured four different sets. In addition to the
Tickled Pink runway on the mainstage, there was the Beaverologist Podcast,
Emergency Room (featuring “Hacks’” Paul W. Downs as a hospital doctor),
Neanderthal Town Hall and the Queen News Network, an obvious wink to
“SNL’s” Weekend Update. The latter is a perfect example of the way “Drag Race”
allows Chu to poke loving fun at pop culture through the drag lens.

“I love that it’s loose and a little bit improvised. And I like that it’s a contemporary approach to referencing pop culture itself, which is really fun,” she said.

“Sometimes I think the fans might be even more in tune with the references
than I am, because I’m constantly expanding my drag-reference vocabulary,” Chu added. “There are so many layers to drag references, and they date back so
many decades — just very, very obscure, old but iconic moments in pop culture.”

As a child of immigrants, she was the first person in her family to watch much
American TV. “I have a very deep education and I studied design extensively,
but I haven’t necessarily studied sketch comedy as much. It’s my job to just keep
up with what’s considered to be iconic or important or recognizable within the
culture, and it is very broad.”

Chu came to “Drag Race” three seasons ago after a career that included the reality shows “Project Runway” and “Real Life: The Musical.” She feels lucky that she joined the show at a time when it was reworking its mainstage. “They had
to get some new gear, which gave us the opportunity to redesign it. We felt
like screens would give us a little bit more flexibility, so I got to do some pretty
major facelifts with them.”

The biggest change for Season 17, though, came in the form of the Badonka
Dunk Tank. For this twist, two eliminated queens would be able to remain in
the competition if they randomly pulled a correct lever that dropped RuPaul’s
best friend, Michelle Visage, into a tank of lukewarm water.

“There happened to be a dunk tank that was pretty famously on Nickelodeon and also on the ‘Ellen’ show. We were like, ‘OK, how can we take that framework and make it draggy?’ So we rented the apparatus and made it our own by giving it a little bit of an illuminated proscenium and whatnot. Our lighting department lit it up from within to be really beautiful, and I think it actually exceeded everybody’s
expectations and it was one of our favorite parts of the season.”

“That’s why I love working in L.A.,” Chu noted. “If you’re like, ‘I need a dunk
tank that can hold 65,000 gallons of water and it has to be really deep and
strong and you have to be able to heat the water,’ you can just call around and
somebody’s like, ‘I got a friend who’s got a friend who’s got a friend who’s got a
friend who has that tank.’ It’s all just part of the challenge.”

“Obviously, in drag, there’s so much improvising and so much creativity and so much turning one thing into another thing, so we definitely are doing that behind the scenes just as much as they’re doing it in front of the camera,” she concluded.

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy issue here.

The post ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Production Design Team Does Just as Much Improv Behind the Scenes as the Queens Do on Camera appeared first on TheWrap.

“It’s hard to actually portray how complicated it is on television,” director of photography Joshua Gitersonke told TheWrap of the long-running reality series, whose recently aired Season 37 has been nominated for six Emmys. “The show is based on the relationships, how hard it is for the contestants to get from place to place and do the events and deal with other teams. But it doesn’t really show that the camera and sound teams are doing basically everything that the contestants are doing while also shooting a television show, making sure that they don’t get run over by a taxi or run over by a bus in a random country, keeping themselves safe as they run through a city.”

Quite deliberately, camera crews are rotated amongst the contestants as they travel across the globe as their numbers are narrowed down from 14 two-person teams to one winning pair.

“Every episode, the teams will have a new camera and sound team,” Gitersonke said. “It’s only toward the end of the race, where once they’ve gone through all of the camera people, that they will again see a crew that they’ve run with. I do my best to make it as fair as possible. You’d be amazed to see how, in real life, what the camera and sound people are doing — they’re running with 50 pounds of gear, split between the camera and sound person.”

Gitersonke, who joined the CBS reality series as a camera operator in 2010’s
Season 17, has served as DP since Season 30. “I know exactly what everybody’s
going through,” he said. “While it’s an amazing, visceral experience, it’s still a
pretty difficult one. The people working on the show are like very high-level athletes as well as great cinematographers, because you have to be both to follow a real race around the world, up hills and down hills, through cities. The show has
complete trust, since the cinematographers are following, essentially, by them-
selves from place to place. The show transforms from a single-camera, documen-
tary-style show to a multi-cam show minute by minute. Wherever they’re going,
everybody has to be really good at knowing when other people are around.”

One constant in the operators’ tool bag is the show’s classic zoom-in shot that
occurs when a team makes a costly error along the way, and the camera points
out their mistake without alerting the contestants. “We are pretty good about
panning to things when they’re not paying attention,” Gitersonke said. “You
only have limited time to get the mistake or shoot them running by something
and then also panning up to the sign that says they should have run the other
way. I don’t believe I’ve ever known any contestant who really paid attention to
the camera people. They are in blinders, they don’t pay attention to what we’re
doing most of the time, but everybody does try to time those things so that
they’re not telegraphing what the contestants need to do.”

For Season 37, the 14 teams raced more than 29,000 miles through 10 countries across three continents, careful to follow each country’s laws and customs. “All of the crews work on the idea of respecting the country we’re in,” Gitersonke said. “Most of us wear lightweight pants and shirts with sleeves, so we’re not running around with shorts and a T-shirt if the event happens in a mosque or a church or a federal building or something like that. Everybody looks respectable.”

And after working on “TAR” for 15 years, the DP admitted it’s impossible to
pick a favorite locale. “With ‘The Amazing Race,’ you could be in the most innocuous country and end up seeing the most interesting thing,” he said. “We go to places where a regular vacation wouldn’t take you, or where you wouldn’t go if
you were a tourist. I always tell the contestants that it’s the best vacation you
can’t pay for.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy issue here.

The post ‘The Amazing Race’ DP Reveals How They Keep the Game Fair With Rotating Camera Ops appeared first on TheWrap.

Aduba’s latest Emmy nomination, the sixth of her career, is for her work in Netflix’s short-lived White House whodunit “The Residence,” in which she portrays the eccentric, witty and damn good consulting detective Cordelia Cupp, whose keen eye for detail, extreme confidence and unequivocal passion for birding keep her leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else. Cordelia is brought in to solve the murder of White House chief usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), whose death catapults her into an intricate web of oddball personalities. 

But that doesn’t mean Aduba has gotten used to the accolades — far from it, actually. “It’s wild,” the 44-year-old actress said during a recent Zoom interview. “It’s literally that feeling of, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’” Aduba is on the precipice of making her own Emmy history should she triumph over incumbent Jean Smart, Ayo Edebiri, Quinta Brunson and Kristen Bell for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She’s in line to tie four-time winners Alfre Woodard and Regina King for most acting Emmys earned by a Black performer. “Wild is the word that I keep using for this. That’s my word this year.”

So it comes with some bittersweetness that the door is now permanently closed on “The Residence,” which received three additional nods for production design, visual effects and its main title theme music. Prior to its July 2 cancellation after one season (just a little over a week after Emmy voting concluded), creator Paul William Davies alluded to the possibility of Aduba’s Cordelia solving a new murder mystery outside the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Season 2.

“We had an incredible time making that show. That’s just the bottom line. Our (group) chat is still going. We’re still hanging out,” Aduba said. Though “it would have been wonderful to see what other adventures Cordelia would go on, the truth of the matter is, I always feel like my characters go on anyway — I think Suzanne right now is out doing amazing things. I never think their stories end. So I keep sitting with that fundamental truth that I let my imagination live with.”

You’re one of the few actors who have been recognized by the Television Academy in both the comedy and drama categories. Does each nomination feel different to you?

Yes. I think the first of anything always feels like it’s in a different stratosphere. Particularly for my first [Emmy nomination and win for “Orange Is the New Black”], there was so much wrapped in that first — my first show, all of those things. I had so little knowledge of what I had stepped into. The whole thing was like you’re driving a car on a highway and it’s whipping past you. Did you see that? That’s amazing! 

I have different relationships with each experience as I have grown as a human, an actor, a person working in this business, and also as my life has grown. Every single person has their own experiences that none of us are privy to that are joyful and challenging, and then there are things we all experienced collectively five years ago [with the pandemic]. But I think when you start to live a little more, they all take on a different shape because life has informed the experience in different ways that make the celebration of the moment different. And the shape of the work is already being infused by those experiences. Because of all of those lived experiences, what I have developed is an even greater appreciation for getting to be able to do this thing. 

Piggybacking off that, how have your lived experience and your current place in life shaped your understanding of Cordelia Cupp? Could you have done this role at the start of your career?

That’s a great question. You know, I needed this part to come to me in a moment when I was a bit longer in my spine. As it relates to the work, I am not sure at an early stage in my career I would have trusted stillness as an action, a strong action. That actually requires you to have lived a little bit to know what it is to be strong in a single choice. I would have thought I needed to do something all the time with Cordelia when, number one, that’s not what’s written, and number two, how Paul William Davies shaped the story is she’s a birder. Her hobby is to be still, and she applies that hobby to what it is that she does. I’m not sure I would have had the trust in myself to just practice the exercise, because that’s kind of how I think of acting. What is this act? What is this part supposed to be? An exercise in stillness, and [let] that be enough.

You’ve mentioned before how different you are from Cordelia in everything, from mannerisms to speaking style­ — she really loves her metaphors and she can be incredibly frank. What did living in her skin teach you?

Well, you’ve seen me move like 19 times while talking. [Laughs] What I did learn from her is that sometimes you can actually just sit back and let the news come to you. You don’t always have to deliver the news — just let the information come to you. I think that’s an exercise in journalism as I understand it. A departure for me is I probably don’t say everything that she will say. [Laughs] She’ll say something and it’s like, “What did she just say about my hair?” and she’s already onto the next thing. She will tell you every single drip and drop of what she’s thinking.

I needed this part to come to me in a moment when I was a bit longer in my spine. As it relates to the work, I am not sure at an early stage in my career I would have trusted stillness as an action, a strong action.

What I really got from her is the ability to listen. Details matter, and that’s how she pieces things together. To listen when the bell goes off. She heightened my ear a little bit to really listen to the details of what someone is saying. But the big piece is it’s OK to just settle and receive.

She’s also a character who’s built up as the world’s best detective, which has a level of pressure attached to it. How did you live up to that reputation?

The key piece was to not have reverence whenever she’s walking into the room. That to her, every place she ever is — it doesn’t matter if it’s the White House or the Vatican — it’s a crime scene. That beat before we see her birding on the South Lawn, she might take a breath, and it would not be because she’s about to step in the White House; it’s because she’s about to have her dream come true to satisfy [Teddy Roosevelt’s] birding list, which she never would have been able to achieve unless she had a reason to be in the House. 

At the end of the day, she knows what she does is something very important, and that’s to solve murders. It gave her the backbone to be the way she would be with chief adviser Harry Hollinger [Ken Marino] or the president or the Australian prime minister. She’s not intimidated because the truth of the matter is in her world, she’s the best. I wanted her, from minute one, to know she belongs. 

There’s a poignant moment in the series when Cordelia tells her nephew the story of her first case — finding her sister’s missing favorite sock, a gift from their brother — after he tells her his mother calls her “difficult” and “single-minded.” It’s such a vital scene because it reveals who Cordelia is, how she operates and why she’s so settled into the way she is. Was that scene eye-opening for you?

I was so thankful to Paul for having written it. I thought that scene told two stories. Number one, how she keeps a face that nobody can read. In that episode, you realize there is a huge loss happening in that family [with the death of Cordelia’s brother], and what I mined from that was, I wonder who Cordelia was two clicks before that happened. People deal with grief in all different ways, and maybe this is how she could manage her feelings. Imagine she might actually not be an emotionless person; she maybe actually feels a lot of things and in order to not feel those things, she has to put a lid on it, to keep it down here because if it gets to even chest level, that’s too much. And that’s how she was able to survive that moment, and it continued throughout her and her sister’s life.

The other piece of it for me was there are different ways to love, and just because she does not love in the same way and function as her sister does not mean she cannot love or has not shown expressions of love. That story, I thought, was so revealing of who Cordelia is and the size of her heart; she would use this that she knows she’s good at — remembering details — to give that level of importance to her sister’s most valued item because it takes her back to that valued time when the family was whole. Those socks probably meant something to Cordelia too, and she needs her sister to be whole. She can’t lose anything more. 

Is there a specific episode you hang your hat on?

I would say [Episode] 8 is the strongest in terms of what it meant to me. We find out who did it. We find out how Cordelia found out. In that episode, Paul did such a great job of warping us into her mind. She was interested in finding out who did it, but she was also very invested in “The Real Housewives of the White House,” you know? [Laughs] Like, why are all these people doing all these crazy things?

She was secretly thriving with all the gossip.

Yeah! She wanted the tea. She wanted to know what was going on. [Laughs] That’s the only episode where everybody is together and that was really satisfying. I spent seven episodes working with all of them — Randall [Park], Giancarlo, Susan [Kelechi Watson], Edwina [Findley], Jason [Lee], Ken, Molly [Griggs] — but it was the first time I got to see the collection of us together. We had each been in our individual silos, but to be able to come together, it made it really fun. They met Detective Cupp [in the beginning], and in 8, they met Cordelia. You get to see why she loves her job and she’s really excited to walk you through this thing, and they got to meet the real woman, which I really liked.

Ever since you broke through with “Orange Is the New Black,“ you’ve made your time in front of the camera count. How would you sum up these past 12 years?

More than I’ve ever dreamed it could be. I did not dream all of this. I dreamed too small.  

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Uzo Aduba’s Wild Year: Goodbye, ‘The Residence’ Hello, 6th Emmy Nomination appeared first on TheWrap.

“We paid a lot of attention to the fluidity and continuity of the time space,” Strand said. “But we didn’t pay a lot of attention to the accuracy of how the minutes fall within the hour. So if a character says a time of death is at 11:37 or something like that, I don’t know that it landed at the 37th minute of the hour. When I was cutting the pilot, there was an idea of, ‘How much of the traveling through space [in real time] do we want to spend with them? Do I really need to see them take the steps? Could it be four steps? Two steps?’ But I found that when you travel with people, certainly when the stories are continuing, that travel time added to the tension.”

One of the reasons “The Pitt” has such immediacy is its use of the Z-rig (or Zero G), a fluid camera that has a Steadicam vest and arm function, allowing for changes in height to accommodate actors on the move.

“To make sure that everyone’s in step and continuous, they had to do full resets for a scene,” said Strand, who added that this is a fairly unusual process on a TV series. “Where you normally might just do a pickup shot later in a scene, there’s so many moving parts here, so it was easier to go all the way back to one so that everyone’s behavior could be landing in the same time frame. So we started getting these incredibly long takes. It actually makes the editing very smooth to cut because it’s consistent.”

One inspiration while making “The Pitt” was Jonathan Glazer’s haunting, Oscar-winning WWII drama “The Zone of Interest,” which was notable for following characters through spaces without an abundance of editorialization. The series is dramatically different from Glazer’s film, but once made aware of that approach, a viewer can start to see the influence.

“In that film, action would happen where you may be following somebody (in one part of the screen) while something else is still going on,” Strand said. “That defined the world that we were going to be in. We’re going to leave trauma rooms. We’re going to re-enter those rooms, and you may still be interested in what’s going on and eager to find out what happens, which would add tension as we move back out, check on somebody, check on a third person and then make our way back into the space.”

Strand also noted that most of the actors rarely disappeared from set, giving the show more of an all-in, hangout vibe where they were always hyper-aware of the storylines unfolding even if they weren’t central to all of those stories.

“I think it does fill in the texture of the world that it’s really happening right now, and these people are moving through the space,” Strand said. “Seeing those people in the background is another building block that keeps it feeling more
real.”

And Strand’s job was immeasurably helped by one of the directives from a key creator. “John Wells…if he sees anything that feels soapy, over the top, not real, anything that feels not grounded, that stuff’s going out. It’s all textured. Nobody’s bad, nobody’s good. People have points of view.”

This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How ‘The Pitt’ Editor Helped Create the Series’ Real-Time Tension appeared first on TheWrap.

It’s on that not-quite-hopeful note that the series based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel by the same name ends — a frighteningly realistic conclusion to a show that, over six seasons, has reflected the United States’ slide into autocracy and the erosion of women’s rights.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” debuted just months after President Trump started his first term, and the image of red-cloaked women forced into reproductive servitude became a haunting one for an administration that would go on to overturn Roe v. Wade. According to series creator Bruce Miller, that all happened by chance.

“A lot of the credit goes to Margaret,” he said. “The book she wrote was not timeless, but every time I read it, [I would think], ‘Oh, this is the perfect time, putting it out when the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell were rising in power.’ I think it’s more a function of her being able to put her finger on the eternal conflicts between society and gender and misogyny and male power.”

Yahlin Chang, who was co-showrunner with Eric Tuchman on Season 6 and joined the series as a writer in Season 2, pointed out that while Atwood’s book is dystopian fiction, it is deeply rooted in reality. “Margaret said she never made
anything up,” Chang said. “So we also tried to not make anything up. I think that’s why the show feels realistic — because we imagined what would happen with authoritarians in charge or people with authoritarian leanings.”

To Hulu’s credit, the exec producers said, they never felt censored, even when writing plot lines involving genital mutilation, poisonings and hangings. The streaming service was determined to make a drama that could compete with anything HBO made. And it succeeded: In 2017, “The Handmaid’s Tale” won the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy, becoming the first (and still only) streaming series to do so. (It went on to win 15 total Primetime Emmys.

“It’s hard to realize how much they protected the show, how much they fought for the show and went to the mat for us,” Miller said.

Of course, none of it would have worked without the Emmy-winning performance of Moss, who also exec-produced and directed 10 of the series’ 66 episodes. “Lizzie’s directed a couple of my scripts, and no one approaches their work as a director with more thoughtfulness and preparation,” Tuchman said. “When I knew that Lizzie would be directing Episode 9 (this season), which is a big episod —a lot of spectacle and really intense two-handers between people—I knew it was in the best hands possible because she cares so much.”

Winding down such a complex, brutal story after nearly 10 years wasn’t easy, especially given the high expectations of the show’s vocal fans. When Chang and Tuchman spoke to TheWrap, the finale had yet to air, and both seemed nervous that viewers would be mad that they killed major characters. “We really wanted to do justice by our fans,” Chang said. “At the same time, we know that we’re not giving them everything that they want, and that’s hard.”

Still, Miller insisted they always knew where they were going from the beginning: with Moss looking into the camera and beginning to tell the story that has transpired over six seasons. The click of a tape recorder is heard, then: “My name is Offred.” The conclusion circles back to the very first episode of Season 1, when we first heard that click.

“It was a question of how much stuff is going to happen in between and making sure they ended up in a place where that made sense for their characters,” said Miller, who is currently working on “The Testaments,” the spinoff series
based on Atwood’s 2019 sequel, which focuses on Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd).

“It’s always been the natural place for June: ‘It’s valuable for me and worth it for me to tell you that story. It’s going to be hard, and it’s going to have loss in
it, but it’s going to make you realize how strong people can be.’”

This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Became a Mirror for the Trump Era — By Accident appeared first on TheWrap.

“We just faced each other and said, ‘What the f—?’” Gilroy explained. “Physically, you couldn’t do it.” They also questioned who would pay for five seasons of an incredibly expensive, intricately designed and carefully plotted space opera, which some critics have deemed the franchise’s greatest entry since the original 1977 “Star Wars.” “It was just impossible. The amount of work that went into these two seasons is…You couldn’t do five,” Gilroy said.

So the creator and EP hatched a different plan: Every three episodes of the show’s second season would jump forward in time by a year, as if the show were zooming through hyperspace. The final cluster of episodes would end right before the events of “Rogue One.” “We came back to them and said, ‘Hey, we’ll do a second season where we do all four years in one season,’” Gilroy said. “And they were like, ‘OK, we’ll go for that.’”

Gilroy said that the hardest aspect of this approach was convincing the studio that it would work “without doing all the corny exposition that would normally be attendant with that.” To prove that they could pull it off, Gilroy created a proof of concept: “I wrote the top and the tail of each block to set the frame for each year. And I took that into the writers’ room so nobody could tell me that it wouldn’t work. And then we filled in from there.”

The new structure galvanized the “Andor” team. “It’s very exciting as a writer,” Gilroy said. “And it’s exciting for the actors, too. We kept waiting for it to fail, going, ‘There must be something that’s going to bite us here.’ We kept waiting for a bugaboo that never appeared.”

While the show is now officially over, there are undoubtedly elements that will be explored in ancillary media — comic books, video games and the like. For his part, Gilroy is content with his time in a galaxy far, far away and no longer sees himself as the gatekeeper of this particular piece of “Star Wars” mythology. “I paid rigorous attention to the canon that I’m supposed to pay attention to. I’ve ignored the canon that I’m allowed to ignore,” he said. “I don’t own the IP, so they can do what they want.”

When we asked how closely “Andor” Season 2 resembled what he initially set out to make, even Gilroy wasn’t sure. “You spend so much time constructing and tearing down in your imagination. It’s just such a constant process,” he said. Some scenes stayed the same throughout, including a final confrontation between Denise Gough’s Imperial officer and Stellan Skarsgård’s Rebel operative, as well as another where Andor encounters a Force healer. Others went through endless iterations.

The final scene, with a main character looking off into the distance, at once heartbreaking and optimistic, was one Gilroy had dreamed up early in the show’s development. “I wanted to be able to not feel like a sadist with what I was doing with these characters and have some hope,” he said. “Legit hope. Not cheesy T-shirt hope, but real hope.”

This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How Tony Gilroy Brought ‘Andor’ to an Elegant End appeared first on TheWrap.

In “1923,” she plays the strong-willed frontierswoman Cara Dutton, the matriarch of a family of ranchers who’s dealing with the encroachment of modernity and perpetually struggling to keep her farm afloat. And in “MobLand,” she’s Maeve Harrigan, the ruthless matriarch of a crime family operating in modern-day London. This is Mirren at her most venomous and unchained, as she pushes her capo husband, Conrad (Pierce Brosnan), into new lines of business and eggs on Eddie (Anson Boon), her more darkly villainous grandson (who might not even be her grandson at all). Concidentally, both characters are Irish.

She is also as sharp and funny and skilled a performer as ever, which came across when we spoke to her recently over Zoom. After we said we were curious about something, she shot back with a laugh, “I don’t think you’re that curious.” Oh, but we were.

What drew you to “1923“ and “MobLand”?
In the case of “1923,” it was to do with my two leading men: I had Taylor Sheridan and I had Harrison Ford, two pretty amazing forces in American entertainment. Harrison always says, “I only came on board because you were on board.” And I always say, “No, I only came on board because you were on board.” Obviously they pulled a fast one on both of us. But we were both there because of Taylor, mainly. Although with Taylor, you have to jump in without reading anything. You have no idea who or what you’re playing, because he says he likes to write for the actor that he knows he’s working with, which totally makes sense to me. But it means you have to go in blind. You really don’t know what’s awaiting you.

And in a way, with “MobLand,” it was not such a different scenario because I was working with Pierce Brosnan on a Chris Columbus film called “The Thursday Murder Club” that will be coming out quite soon. And we were both asked at the same time. It was the same thing: I was told that he was in it and he was told that I was in it, only we happened to be working together so we could ask each other, and we discussed it together. It’s a combination of working with Pierce, who’s an actor I both admire and love deeply. He’s such a great guy. I knew it would be fun and just a lovely journey. And, of course, Guy Ritchie. Again, two leading men.

Both of these characters are so juicy, too.

Oh, of course. In the case of “1923,” I didn’t know. “MobLand,” I think I only read the first episode, so we didn’t really know where it was going at all. That was fun. I love that sense of jumping into the unknown. I’ve always enjoyed that.

You had no idea how villainous your “MobLand“ character was? Would you have played her differently knowing that?
No. I love having to invent on the spot. I love that process. I love reading something that I have no idea what it is and discovering it as you go along. I find that very creative. And “MobLand” was like that. I hope we get to do it again.

Going into Season 2 of “1923“ you probably knew her arc, having played her already.
Oh no, absolutely not. By then, obviously I know the character, who the person is. The relationship, Harrison and I fell into in a very natural and easy way. But no, I had no idea. I thought maybe I was going to die. Actually. I thought, “Oh, they’re definitely going to kill me off. I’m going to get a horrible disease and die, probably.” But that was not the case. So, no idea. It’s such fun. Here comes Episode 6. What’s going to happen?

You’ve been doing this for so long, what still excites you about projects like these?
I was 21 when I started acting professionally. And many things still excite me. The technology is constantly evolving, and I’ve seen such enormous changes in technology, obviously, in my career. And every time you walk on a film set, there’s new technology or a new idea that the props guy has come up with that you’ve never seen before or a new way of doing focus. Focus is extraordinary because the most important person on the set is actually the focus puller. More important than the director or the actor is the focus puller and the whole technique now of focus pulling, which has become digitalized. It’s very exciting to watch all of those developments, I find. And also, discovering wonderful new young actors, seeing the next generation appearing.

This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post With ‘1923’ and ‘MobLand,’ Helen Mirren Is Having the Time of Her Life appeared first on TheWrap.

But beneath Sinatra’s icy exterior is a woman far more complex than viewers are initially led to believe. It’s all by design. “I don’t want her to be a traditional villain or bad guy, but a more layered person — one who has put one foot in front of the other and gotten to this place,” Nicholson said. 

The 53-year-old actress, who won an Emmy in 2021 for her supporting role in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” and is also a contender for her comedic guest role as Dance Mom in Max’s “Hacks,” said Sinatra is “unlike any character” she’s played before. “To be acting for close to 30 years now and still get to find new characters to play is the dream.” 

How much did you know about your character and the story when “Paradise“ first came to you?

I was sent the first four scripts. I knew that Dan had written it. They told me James [Marsden] was the president and Sterling [K. Brown] was his Secret Service [agent]. That was as much as I was aware of, so it was great to go in cold. At the end of the first episode, I was already sort of grabbed. When you get that twist in the end and realize where we are, oh my God, whole new worlds open up — quite literally. 

Then I read the second episode, which was Sinatra’s backstory. I was very moved by this woman, her experience, where she started from and where she finds herself in present-day Paradise. I’ve never read or seen episodes that are solely dedicated to learning more about one of the characters in an ensemble like that. 

I remember watching the first episode thinking it’s just a show about who murders the president and then it transforms into something entirely different by the end of that first hour.

Dan is such a bold writer. He’s clearly so good at the drama and the personal relationships, but it’s very brave when writers start going out of their comfort zone. And in Season 2, he goes even more in those directions. It’s really exciting to watch it unfold, especially because he’s so good at bringing it all back together. I’ve heard him say he doesn’t want to leave people hanging in a massive way, like he wants to tease people. But you want some closure at the end of a season, while enticing [them] a little bit more. I just think he’s the master at that.

Sinatra is a fascinating character because in the present day, she’s cold, emotionless and almost untouchable. She’s also quite scary. But the second episode, like you said, fills in a lot of blanks about what led her to become this way. Was that episode the biggest one for you from Season 1? 

Yes, for sure. In the different periods of her life where we meet her, she really goes through a range of experiences and it’s a layering of one thing on top of the other. The tragedy of losing her son is the biggest thing in her life and the thing she can’t move past, make any sort of peace with or have any understanding around. And it informs every decision that she makes from then on out — trying to protect her family and what she has left. I felt very lucky that that episode came so early in the season because it was very informative for me. I thought it was helpful for the audience to have that different understanding of her, to feel maybe more empathy for who that person is: the character you love to hate. 

What is her endgame?

Dan has said that we have this three-season [plan], so I have no idea where she’s going. I’m learning about her with each script also, which is kind of exciting. I love playing Sinatra, so I can’t wait to get back in there because you learn more about the character with every scene that you film. I feel like my understanding of her grows and that’s really fun.

You have several intense confrontations with Sterling. How did you play those out on set?

We basically gave each other space. I have so much respect for Sterling as a person and as an actor, and so we kind of kept to our separate corners and we would meet each other when the cameras were rolling. [The final showdown] was great direction and editing, and Sterling coming in with such power and intensity, and me trying to meet that and knowing where the stakes are at that point in our story. It is like a little ballet; it’s a dance where everyone has their steps. 

One of my favorite storylines throughout Season 1 is charting Sinatra and Jane’s mentor-protege dynamic, especially because of where things end for Sinatra. She really should’ve just given Jane the Wii like she wanted.

She didn’t really know who she was getting into [bed with]. Just give her the Wii! It’s not yours anyway. Who cares? I think from now on, if it comes up again, just give the person whatever they want.

Sinatra is in bad shape after Jane shoots her. There’s concern there.

There sure is. I know I’m sort of intrigued. I love that her big bad is a lovely young woman, right? I feel like that’s a fun and interesting misdirect, and Nicole [Brydon Bloom] is so great and so talented, so it’s fun. I’m looking forward to Season 2 and hopefully having stuff to do together.

What are you most looking forward to in Season 2? We know there will be new faces coming in, namely Shailene Woodley.

I’m really excited. It’s fun having some distance now from Sinatra, having done the work and seen the show. You sort of plant that seed and you water it, and now that little plant is growing. It’s going deeper. It’s having a deeper understanding of who she is. And Dan has planted little seeds about where she’s going and some of the things she needed to do to make Paradise happen. I can’t wait to see what she gets up to. 

A version of this story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Why Julianne Nicholson’s ‘Paradise’ Villain Is a ‘Character You Love to Hate’ appeared first on TheWrap.