Cara Buckley

Fonda, who is 81, moved to Washington in September to highlight the urgency of the climate crisis by staging protests at the Capitol, where, wrapped in a bright red coat, she has been arrested every Friday for the past four weeks, often with a famous friend or two in tow: Sam Waterston, Ted Danson and, on Friday, Catherine Keener and Rosanna Arquette. Fonda plans to keep protesting until mid-January, when production of her Netflix show, “Grace and Frankie,” resumes, and expects to turn 82 in jail, on Dec. 21.

“I said to her, ‘Are you really going to make me do this?’ ” Keener recalled Thursday night. “She said, ‘I won’t if you don’t want to.’ ” The next day, Keener, Arquette and Fonda were among the 46 people the police led off in plastic handcuffs for occupying the soaring atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

Keener and Arquette were fined and released a few hours later, but Fonda, who had a court date because of her prior arrests, spent the night in jail, as expected. “One night, big deal!” Fonda told reporters minutes before the sit-in began.

Fonda is hale, but being arrested at her age brings challenges, like staying balanced with bound hands while clambering into a police wagon. Last week brought a respite of sorts when police led those arrested, whose numbers have tripled since she began protesting, into an easier-to-board short bus with low steps, as onlookers cheered, “Yeah, Jane!” Upon her release the next day, Fonda told The Washington Post that she had used the coat as a mattress and that her bones hurt.

Celebrity protesters make for soft targets, and Fonda said that there was no question she benefited from her white privilege and fame, but that she was using what she had. She drives an electric car, eschews plastic, eats less red meat and has cut down on air travel — celebrities often opt for private jets, while Fonda said she flies commercial — but said she was protesting out of a need to do more.

“Why be a celebrity if you can’t leverage it for something that is this important?” she said.

She hopes to inspire others to flood the streets and compel lawmakers to force fossil fuel companies to keep trillions of dollars of remaining oil reserves in the ground. Whether this lofty goal is reached, she has at the least made pop culture inroads. Her recent acceptance of a Bafta Award while getting arrested went viral, and Buzzfeed’s suggested Halloween couples costumes included dressing as Fonda and her arresting officer.

Though Fonda has been an activist throughout her life, the only other time she has spent the night in jail was in 1970, when she was 32, on a speaking tour protesting the Vietnam War. That’s when she was arrested in Cleveland for possession of what Fonda says were vitamins; charges were dropped. Two years later she visited North Vietnam, landing the nickname Hanoi Jane, and went on to apologize repeatedly for causing any insult to U.S. soldiers. The nickname has stuck, though, and at the protest Friday at least one detractor, wearing a MAGA hat, repeatedly shouted it her way.

Her demonstrations and arrests now are productions unto themselves. There are speakers and musicians, weekly topics (the ocean, women, militarization) and, each Thursday night, an hourlong teach-in that is streamed live on Facebook.

The most recent one included Fonda’s close friend playwright Eve Ensler, and policy strategist Emira Woods, as Arquette and Keener sat cross-legged on the floor. “You look so cute!” Fonda told them. “My fearless leader!” Keener replied. Fonda had just flown in from a speaking gig in Detroit, where she appeared with Lily Tomlin, her “Grace and Frankie” co-star, and shortly after the teach-in ended at 8 p.m., Fonda yelled, “Let’s go to bed!”

The protest and arrest plan began to take shape over Labor Day, when she was vacationing in Big Sur with Keener and Arquette. Fonda had been fighting what she described as deep-seated physical malaise and depression that she ascribed to ever-worsening climate news.

That weekend, she was reading an advance copy of Naomi Klein’s new book, “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,” and it hit her like a lightning bolt. “It was just cooking, cooking, and then she was on the phone,” recalled Keener (who worked with Fonda and Arquette on the 2012 film “Peace Love &amp; Misunderstanding”).

During a conference call with Klein, Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, and environmental activist Bill McKibben, the plan was born. They called the events Fire Drill Fridays, inspired by Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s cri de coeur, “Our house is on fire.” The plan called for protesters to wear red, and Fonda said her new coat, bought on sale at Neiman Marcus, would be the last item of clothing she would ever buy, because she does not need more stuff.

“I think she took just the right message from the example of the young school strikers,” McKibben wrote in an email. “It’s good that kids are leading, but it’s not O.K. to take the biggest problem on earth and assign it to 15-year-olds.”

There have been hitches. Moving to D.C. meant missing time with her 3-month old grandson. And Fonda’s plans to bring along her dog, a 15-year-old Coton de Tulear named Tulea that she describes as her “soul mate,” were scotched after she became too ill to fly.

There was also the matter of “Grace and Frankie.” Production of the show’s final season is scheduled to begin in January, so Fonda asked Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer of Netflix, if it could be delayed for one year. Sarandos said no. (The exchange was confirmed by Netflix.) Fonda also had several speaking commitments related to the show. “I tried to get out of everything, but I couldn’t because I signed contracts,” she said.

Friday morning dawned bright and cool in Washington, and in a church basement near the Supreme Court, dozens of Fire Drill Friday protesters gathered to eat pastries, drink coffee and strategize.

After finishing an interview with NPR, Fonda, wearing her red coat and a tilted olive fedora, flitted among them like a mother bird, delivering greetings and long hugs. Then they marched toward the Capitol, Fonda leading the way, camera crews and other journalists hustling to keep up.

A stage with a Fire Drill Fridays backdrop was set up on the lawn, and among the hundreds gathered were alumni from Fonda’s high school, the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York; members of Elders Climate Action, and someone dressed in a plush polar bear costume. Fonda greeted them all, and invited up speakers; among them Keener, Arquette (“Every human life depends on honoring our planet”) and Ensler, who recited a poem about the Earth that left listeners misty-eyed. Then it was off to the Senate building, where, shortly before her arrest, Fonda was asked if her civil disobedience was having its intended effect.

“You are all here,” she said, indicating the swarm of camera crews and journalists. “So I think it’s working.”

This article originally appeared in

Jane Fonda at 81, Proudly Protesting and Going to Jail

WASHINGTON — The night before Jane Fonda was arrested here again last week, a member of her social media team asked whether she would consider writing a letter from jail. “With what?” Fonda replied. “I’ll be without my phone.” She paused a beat, “Or adult diapers.” Also, Fonda continued, musing out loud, it was one thing for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to write a letter from jail. But her? The plan was nixed.

“I look back at 6 and go, ‘How did I get an Emmy for that?’ ” Rhys said in a recent chat.

Still, he ranks his performance that season — the show’s last — way above Seasons 1 and 2, when he reckons his acting was, in his words, “at its worst,” because at the time he wanted to wow Keri Russell, his co-star and soon-to-be-romantic partner. “You know when you’re trying too hard?” he said. “I was trying to impress her by overcompensating, and that never serves you well.”

Clearly he wasn’t that bad: He and Russell have been together for about five years now, and have a son, Sam, who is 3. Rhys’ work on “The Americans” also impressed writer and director Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) enough to hire him to star opposite Tom Hanks in the forthcoming “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” about a skeptical journalist who profiles children’s television host Fred Rogers. (The film is set in the late ’90s; Rogers died in 2003.)

The casting of Hanks as Mister Rogers was almost too perfect; America’s dad playing America’s dad. Casting Rhys as the journalist was more of a gamble. He grew up in Wales watching British children’s shows, and the first time he ever heard about Mister Rogers was in a voice message from his agent telling him about Heller’s film. “I said to Keri, ‘Who is Fred Rogers?’ ” Rhys, who will soon turn 45, recalled. “And then she launched into a two-hour monologue about how he influenced her life. That he was, and so many people said this, almost like a third parent or a baby sitter.”

In the end Rhys, like his character, Lloyd, found himself in Rogers’ thrall, partly because of the soothing effect the show had on Sam, and partly because Joanne Rogers, the host’s widow, said he was not a living saint. “He chose to work incredibly hard at being nice to people, being empathetic,” Rhys said. “When you understand that element of him, my respect and admiration increased tenfold.”

The film, due Nov. 22, has received warm early reviews, and at a recent screening in New York City, audience members stayed glued to their seats, sniffly and rapt, after the credits rolled. Discussing the movie and more, Rhys, who lives in Brooklyn with Russell, spoke by phone from Los Angeles, where he is working on an HBO series about Perry Mason. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: There’s something I find, not disconcerting, but almost unbelievable about Mister Rogers when I’ve watched him. It felt too slow. What was your first reaction after you first, I assume, YouTubed him?

A: Kind of the same. What’s going on here? I didn’t even know what’s going on. Who is this person? If you get right down to it, the format, you’d go, “Well, that’s never going to work.” The longevity of the show proved it absolutely did. His whole deliberate point of view and pauses and the pace of his voice were so children could ultimately listen and follow and process. It was incredibly thought out. And not working at a frenetic custard-pie-in-the-face pace that kids are so used to today. I’ve gone through this a lot with my own son. We’ve been watching “Daniel Tiger” (an animated spinoff of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”), and believe me, it has proved like an armchair psychotherapist. It’s a cartoon that works on kids’ feelings and treating them with maturity and helping them deal with their feelings. Then we started him on (the original) show, and that was revelatory. He’s an incredibly energized, high-energy kid and it absolutely worked. One of the first things he said was, “He’s talking to me.”

Q: Did not knowing about Fred Rogers serve your character’s skepticism about him?

A: I’d no connection to this person, I did have that skepticism in the research, and I could tap into it very easily.

Q: What was your reaction watching the film? It must be odd watching yourself on-screen, but, then again, you must get used to it.

A: It’s terrible. You don’t ever get used to it.

Q: Is it terrible? What’s it like?

A: Horrific. The irony is, actually it’s not ironic at all, is it actually gets worse. I’ve stopped doing it because it’s gotten far worse for me now. Because I get hung up on the wrong things. I get hung up on vain little idiosyncrasies, like, I’ll see something I did with my hands, and I’ll go, “I didn’t know I did that with my hands.” In the next job I find myself literally not doing anything with my hands, kind of sitting on them, until the director goes, “What’s wrong with your hands?”

Q: Was it horrific watching “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”? Which might be tough to answer because you’re here to promote the film.

A: Listen, this isn’t some journalistic ruse of mine to say, “Oh, I could never watch myself, but I was suddenly drawn to the movie.” But I genuinely was. Part of that was Hanks. Marielle said, “I’m going to make you watch the movie.” I went, and there’s some moments like you’re kind of electrocuted, you wince so hard. But genuinely part of me was really bewitched by Hanks in a strange way I wasn’t expecting. All my scenes were about 2 or 3 feet away from him, but I still found myself so drawn in by him. You forget sometimes why Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks. Because he’s kind of seamless. He comes on-screen and you go, “Oh, it’s going to be OK now.” But that takes an enormous amount of skill. What he does in the film was kind of like alchemy. How’s he doing that? He’s doing something else that I don’t even know what he’s doing.

Q: Is asking you what it was like working with Tom Hanks the most obvious question ever?

A: No, because when I have friends who act with big movie stars, my first question to them, you go, “What are they like?” It was incredibly nerve-racking. You’re placed in front of the loveliest person in the world, but I was really tongue-tied for a long time and really scared to be acting in front of him. Acting for me is getting over so much anyway, magnified then by the fact that you’re doing it in front of a true icon of your time who’s really formed an enormous part of your life. What he does effortlessly is he puts everyone at ease, his joking and his questions and his demeanor and on-set behavior just cannot but make you feel relaxed and kind of good.

Q: You show why Lloyd was so shut down and angry and had every reason to be suspicious of a father figure. Lloyd realizes he needs to be a more present father. Did it bleed into how you saw yourself as a dad?

A: Of course. I’m not saying my parents were in any way bad, but you just think, “I won’t parent the way my parents did. I’ll be a modern parent.” And then you realize you’re absolutely not. I realize I was, you know, having no patience with a 2-year-old. And then Mister Rogers reminds you that they’re 2. So yes, it’s like a check-in. When I watch the show with Mister Rogers, I’m learning as much as (Sam) is. That was one of his great skills, being able to empathize with children because he could see their point of view

Q: How do you say “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” in Welsh?

A: This is where tragedy befalls, and I go, what’s the word again in Welsh, and it starts to slip away. Ah, “diwrnod hyfryd yn y gymdogaeth.”

Q: Since you wrapped “The Americans,” do you miss working with Keri?

A: Of course! Our stages were a 10-minute bike ride away, we were working with each other, and the writing we were given, especially the parts we were given, were kind of manna from heaven. It was this perfect little bombshell of a job.

Q: It must’ve been painful, but all good things, right?

A: We did six incredible years, and there is always the danger of wringing the towel dry. I was very pleased with the way they closed it out. It felt right. In many ways, it was right to end it.

Q: I’d like to go back to when you were amazing peroxide blond in “Titus.”

A: Yeah. I had a lot more fun then. Blonds generally do.

Q: Was that your first big movie role?

A: It was my first time coming over to Los Angeles, and one of my first auditions was “Titus” with Julie Taymor, and I got the job. And I was like, “Oh, Hollywood’s great. You just turn up and get these massive films, with these movie stars, it’s really perfect.” And then I couldn’t catch a cold in Los Angeles for the decade that followed.

Q: I imagine “The Americans” was the real turning point — or are there so many turning points?

A: I honestly don’t know. I’ve genuinely stopped saying there are turning points. Because every time I have I’m usually out of work.

Q: Did playing a Russian for six years change your view of Russia?

A: We did a great amount or research on the KGB and Russians and who they were. It was startling what they did. Consequentially nothing to me is a shock. They’ve been doing this for decades. There is nothing new. All they want to do is win, that’s it.

Q: You’ve played Daniel Ellsberg (“The Post”) and Dylan Thomas (“The Edge of Love”). Do you treat playing real people differently?

A: Dylan Thomas, I tell you what was hard about him. Wales as a nation holds him in an incredibly dear place to its heart, reverential. With him, because it means so much, I kind of look back and go, “I wish I could do it again.” So much so I’m still trying to make another film about Dylan Thomas with a friend. I literally want another crack at it.

Q: Seeing male vulnerability on-screen is also part of the power of this film. Is that new for you?

A: Certainly in my formative years growing up, that wasn’t on the table or encouraged or nurtured in any way. I have chosen a profession where the exploration of that is encouraged.

Q: You just said something that I missed — was it that modernity is bringing in the whole-feeling male?

A: The all-feeling male. That’s a terrible line.

Q: No, it’s very good. That’ll be the headline. The All-Feeling Male.

A: Hahhahhaa. I’ll get so much (flak) for that.

Matthew Rhys won an Emmy last year for playing an undercover KGB agent in Season 6 of “The Americans” but he still doesn’t know why.

Mister Rogers Meets a Skeptic

If the Brit Awards do go gender-neutral, they would join the Grammys, which did away with separate male and female awards in 2012, and MTV’s Video Music Awards, which did the same in 2017. MTV scotched gendered prizes at its Movies &amp; TV Awards that year, too. And important prizes like the Nobel, Pulitzer and Man Booker are not allocated separately by sex at all.

Yet with the major acting awards — the Oscars, Baftas, Tonys and Emmys — there are no signs that gendered categories are going anywhere. Even though more artists are identifying as nonbinary, and theater awards in Canada and several American cities have done away with gendered prizes, there seems to be scant momentum in the bigger awards organizations to make the switch.

Now one performer, the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, of “Billions,” is calling on the Television Academy to drop gendered acting categories outright from the Emmys. “I presume no one has asked them directly to make that change, so perhaps this is the right moment,” Dillon said in an interview. “What are the first steps that need to be taken to make that change? Call me. Email me. Let’s get it done.”

But a Television Academy spokesman said that while it “celebrates inclusiveness,” it has no plans to make that change.

Neither does the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which hands out the Baftas, or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the Oscars and has given out separate actor and actress prizes since the first awards in 1929. A Bafta spokeswoman confirmed there would be no changes in the performance categories this season, and a spokeswoman for the American academy said it would “continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation” and planned to keep its current structure in place. An official at the Tonys declined to comment.

Until relatively recently, divvying up acting categories by gender was largely unquestioned. Dillon challenged this in 2017, writing an open letter to the Television Academy about being confounded over whether to submit themselves for Emmy consideration as a supporting actor or actress. The academy replied that Dillon could choose whichever category they identified with. At the time, Dillon opted for actor but said in the interview that making distinctions by gender identity or assigned sex is arbitrary and discriminatory.

“If we separated categories by the colors of eyes, hair or skin, people would go, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Dillon said. “That’s how I feel about gender categories. At this point, it feels unacceptable and unnecessary and archaic.”

The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others.

Proponents of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners.

“Merging gender categories would create a cosmetic definition of equality in an industry where we know that equality does not exist,” said Mark Harris, who covers Hollywood’s awards season for Vanity Fair. “It’s placing this huge bet that sexism is so solved that it doesn’t need to be paid attention to anymore. It’s so solved even though a vast majority of voters in awards groups are men. It’s so solved even though actresses have absolutely no shortage of important and fascinating things to say about the way gender inequities persist in the industry.”

Melissa Silverstein, the publisher of the site Women and Hollywood, agreed, noting that in prize categories that are nongendered, like director, producer and cinematographer, very few women are recognized. In 2017, Steve Pond of The Wrap, found that in fields where acting awards divided by gender were scrapped, men indeed disproportionately bagged more nominations and wins. At the gender-neutral awards handed out by the Television Critics Association, Pond determined that over two decades, men won the individual drama and comedy acting awards seven times out of 10.

But Dillon and other nonbinary actors argue that gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are. If the best actress category was axed and the vast majority of the nominations went to cisgendered men, Dillon said, “We would have to deal with the inequality that still is in Hollywood and always has been when it comes to gender as well as race.”

Becca Blackwell, the nonbinary star of the off-Broadway show “Hurricane Diane,” said that gendered categories obscure a theatrical canon and systems around it that do not value women. “They’re forcing you into boxes for what?” Blackwell said. “Of course women will get short shrift until we deal with the fact that women are still not considered first-class citizens with full agency.”

The Obies, which herald achievements in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theater, do not separate awards by sex, and in recent years, theater awards in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Toronto have adopted gender-inclusive categories, with varied results. Most doubled the number of finalists per performance category, meting out two awards in each.

Leigh Goldenberg, the executive director of Theatre Philadelphia, which administers the city’s Barrymore Awards, said that before the switch, women voiced concerns about being overshadowed given that so many productions revolved around men.

“We eventually got to a place where folks who had those fights — women or people of color — recognized that there needed to be another group brought in, and this would build toward equity for all if we make that change,” Goldenberg said.

Theatre Philadelphia, which has also been working to diversify its adjudicators, held the Barrymores on Monday. Of the eight performance awards, six went to women.

Dale Albright, the deputy director of the Theater Bay Area Awards in San Francisco, said that finalists in the new gender-inclusive performance categories tended to skew male but that the wins were equitably divided between male- and female- identifying performers.

After changes were made in Chicago’s Jeff Awards last year, there was controversy when many of the nominees ended up being male, which Drew Blau, an awards official, said was a reflection of the fact that larger theaters were producing male-centric shows. The hope is that by spotlighting the imbalance and pushing to diversify judges, the awards will balance out.

Meanwhile in Toronto at the Dora Awards over the summer, winners in the performance categories were dominated by women of color, according to Jacoba Knaapen, the executive director of the Toronto Alliance for Performing Arts. “There is inequity overall, but it is trending toward balance,” Knaapen said.

Until such changes are more widely embraced, Blackwell, the trans star of “Hurricane Diane,” said, should they end up nominated for a major award, they would opt to compete with performers who identify as male.

“I’d rather beat out a bunch of cis-men than take an award from a woman,” Blackwell said. “I always joke that I better be the first person with a vagina to get a best actor award.”

Why the Oscars, Emmys and Tonys Are Not Ready for They and Them

Sam Smith, the British crooner with a voice often described as heaven sent, announced in September that “my pronouns are they/them.” Days later, the Brit Awards, which had nominated Smith for top male artist earlier in the year, said the categories would be reconsidered for 2021.

The voices created the Paynes, the Browns, the Cryers and countless other characters and caricatures that peopled Perry’s plays, movies and television series. And they unleashed his golden goose, Madea, the smack-talking, purse-wielding black Southern matriarch that Perry depicted, in tent dresses and a pendulous prosthetic bosom, in dozens of plays and films before retiring the character earlier this year.

Now, with Madea behind him — he was fed up with playing her — Perry’s cultural legacy remains complex, ever evolving, and dependent on what he does next. In the short term, that means opening sprawling new studios here with a big, glittery party this weekend. The studios will serve as the home for an astonishing six new shows, all of which he has written and will direct — part of a major content deal with Viacom.

Is he sacrificing quality for quantity? Perry said he was not aspiring to great artistry. “It’s a business,” he told me. “And key in this business is to deliver to this audience, to superserve them and give them everything they want that you can give them.”

In many ways, Perry still feels like the most successful mogul Hollywood has ever ignored.

“If I was a white man and had done these things, and had this success, they would have had a much different reaction to me,” Perry said one late September day, sitting in his huge, plush office in the Dream Building, the center of the new studios south of downtown. “No one, black or white, has been able to do what I’ve been able to do.”

Perry started out creating plays for black audiences, moving from stage to screen and amassing more than $1 billion in ticket sales so far. His ballooning fortune and fame has been met with criticism that he peddles, as writer Jamilah Lemieux put it in 2009, “buffoonish, emasculated black men and crass, sassy black women.”

Perry’s response now is the same as it was then: that his millions of ardent fans would disagree. “What all of that tells me is my black, my version of my stories, my experiences and my culture are not relevant to some of the critics and some of those people that don’t understand it and don’t like it,” he said.

Undisputed is his employment of scores of black actors, particularly women, who struggled to find work in mainstream Hollywood, an achievement Perry deftly referenced in June when he collected the Ultimate Icon Award at the BET honors.

Hollywood can talk about #OscarsSoWhite, he told the crowd, but “I’ll be down in Atlanta, building my own, because what I know for sure is that if I could just build this table God will prepare it for me in the presence of my enemies.”

The crowd leapt to its feet, the performer Lizzo among them. It was a measure of the reverence for Perry’s achievements, and the recent warmer embrace of his work. Spike Lee, who once infamously described Perry’s work using a racial slur, has since distanced himself from that comment. (For what it’s worth, aside from “Inside Man,” Perry told me, “there’s not a lot of Spike Lee films that I get or understand.”) And Perry is no longer one of the very few black voices in film and television. The rise of power brokers like Ava DuVernay, Donald Glover and Issa Rae, Perry said, has “lifted all of the pressure.”

Many of the stories Perry tells adhere to his tried-and-true formula; threaded with moralizing, they confront tough issues like abuse before shifting to levity, all of which proved deeply cathartic for audiences, and for Perry himself.

Perry grew up in New Orleans with an abusive father, and was sexually molested by several adults. To cope, he learned to slip into a rich, imaginary world. “It would bring me so much joy, no matter what was going on with me as a kid,” he said.

It was only recently that Perry realized that he goes to that same place to write. “I literally have to push them out of my head to go on to the next show, to make them stop talking,” he said.

He wrote all six new Viacom shows, along with a new season of “The Haves and the Have Nots,” for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network — 200 episodes in all — in six months. The writing overlapped with the 43-city Madea farewell tour earlier this year, and I caught a glimpse of what that workload looked like at Radio City Music Hall in May.

A capacity crowd cheered Perry’s longtime castmates, Tamela Mann, Cassi Davis and David Mann, reserving the biggest whoops for Madea herself. Backstage, Perry spent every moment at his laptop, in full Madea regalia, working on one of the new Viacom shows, typing as if possessed. “I’m on autopilot,” he told me. He stopped to issue stage directions, punk the other actors by messing with their props, and, of course, to star in the show. He spent exactly zero seconds in repose.

This voraciousness was why he left his exclusive deal with OWN in 2017, he said, to sign with Viacom, which owns Paramount, his new distributor, and BET. Perry sought limitlessness, and felt the bandwidth at OWN was too narrow. He said he and Winfrey, who, along with Cicely Tyson, is a godparent to his 4-year-old son, remain close. Both women are expected to attend the opening party for his new studios, which might more accurately be described as a kingdom.

They occupy 330 rolling acres of a decommissioned Army base that Perry bought for $30 million in 2015, after outgrowing smaller studios six miles away. Some $250 million went into restoring the new site’s stately 19th-century homes, erecting soundstages named for black luminaries, and building production offices and sets. While the unveiling is this weekend, Perry has produced his shows and movies here for a few years, leasing out space to productions like “Black Panther” and “The Walking Dead.”

There have been calls for films and television shows to boycott Georgia, a major production hub, in protest of the state’s highly restrictive law ruling out abortions once doctors can detect a fetal heartbeat. Perry said his heavy investment here made it impossible for him to leave.

He also does not want to. Perry said he did not agree with the law. “I don’t think it’s a man’s place to tell a woman what she should do with her reproductive organs,” he said. But he also opposes a boycott, saying many people holding the state’s tens of thousands of film and television jobs are against the new law too, and that their votes “can change a whole election.”

He recently turned 50, and once the party and the shows and movies he is committed to making are behind him, he plans to reassess what to do next.

For several emerging black playwrights, his influence remains as potent and divisive as ever. In the off-Broadway show “A Strange Loop” this year, the playwright Michael R. Jackson described Perry’s work as worse for black people than diabetes. Yet Jeremy O. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” now on Broadway, has described Perry as “the country’s most successful experimental playwright,” and Jordan E. Cooper, who wrote “Ain’t No Mo’,” another off-Broadway show from earlier in the year, said growing up watching DVDs of Perry’s plays inspired him to go into theater.

“All black people used to love Tyler Perry until white people found out about Tyler Perry, and then it was ‘Oh no, he is presenting us with this image and that image,’” Cooper said. “But Tyler’s going to be Tyler. And that’s where the rest of us need to take the baton and do our own thing.”

After Madea, Tyler Perry Builds a New Kingdom

ATLANTA — Tyler Perry hears voices in his head, and they have made him wildly popular, divisive and very rich.

Thanks to government delays, it might be a while before Harriet Tubman appears on the $20 bill, but in November the formidable abolitionist will burst onto movie screens.

Directed by Kasi Lemmons, the biopic “Harriet” stars the breakout British actress Cynthia Erivo in the title role, along with Leslie Odom Jr. (“Hamilton”) and Janelle Monáe. Erivo’s electrifying performance as Celie in the 2015 Broadway production of “The Color Purple” made her a star, nabbing her a Tony, among other awards, and led to roles in the 2018 films “Widows” and “Bad Times at the El Royale.”

For anyone, playing one of the most revered abolitionists in American history would be a daunting career high. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped to the North, yet returned to slaveholding states some 19 times — one of her earliest trips back was for her husband, John Tubman — to lead at least 70 people to freedom, feats that earned her the moniker the Moses of her people. “Harriet” is the first major feature film exploring her life, and has unleashed Oscar rumblings, especially for Erivo.

Yet her casting as Tubman led to backlash that resurfaced after the film’s trailer was released in July. Critics cried foul that someone other than a descendant of American slaves would portray such an icon. While similar complaints about British actors in American roles have been raised before, in Erivo’s case, the outcry was especially intense.

In a recent phone interview, Erivo, 32, who lives in New York, urged viewers to withhold judgment until seeing the film and explained why she does not believe Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s reasons for the delays in Tubman’s $20 bill. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Complaints about a British person playing an American seemed louder in this case than when David Oyelowo (“Selma”) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”) played notable Americans. I wonder if the fact that you’re a woman made things more fraught.

A: I can understand where they’re coming from. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it’s Harriet and how she means a great deal to many people. I think that it might also have to do with the fact that with women of color, we don’t have a lot of roles that are full and brilliant and that are full of story and are true. Rarely are those stories told. This might’ve struck people harder. The only thing I can ask for is the benefit of the doubt, that I might have done my job. I worked really hard.

Q: Can you describe that work?

Everything from horse riding to research to the stunts; there was only one I wasn’t allowed to do, and if I was allowed, I would have done it. Kasi was amazing, she did a lot of the research. I did a lot of reading. I made what might’ve been my fourth trip to the (National Museum of African American History and Culture) specifically to look at (Harriet’s) section of it. I did a lot of physical work. I wore the corset 24 hours a day. Everything I could possibly do, I did.

Q: What were some of the most surprising details you learned about her?

A: That the real journey began out of love. I didn’t realize how deeply in love she was with John Tubman. It was him she came back for. Before anything else, she was a woman who was married to a man she loved. She experienced heartbreak that a lot of us face and understand, and dealt with it in the most honorable way. We almost take it for granted that it happened, but it actually came out of a great deal of sacrifice.

Q: What do you think gave Harriet her mettle?

A: I think she was underestimated. She was my height [5-foot-1], she was small. I think an inch or two smaller. It was very easy to be underestimated when you’re that small and you’re a woman and you’re black. I think it’s the combination of being underestimated consistently and just making the decision that the way she was being treated was not OK anymore. She knew it wasn’t right. I don’t believe she thought for one second it was going to be easy. I do believe that as a human being, she had fear, and against her fears she continued, which is stronger than no fear at all.

Q: Did you have to make a leap to an American mindset?

A: Well no, because the thing that I know quite well is being a black girl. It’s something I understand implicitly because that’s how I was born. The stories that we hear about the slave trade, about the degradation and the terrible, awful things that have happened to black people throughout history, they’re not something that I’m unfamiliar with, and they’re not things that don’t hurt. Just because I come from a different continent, that doesn’t negate or keep me out of the loop when it comes to experiencing pain and ostracization and people feeling like I’m other, and I’m not good enough. The continent doesn’t really matter much.

Q: Is there a difference between being a black woman in Britain vs. America?

A: Just because we’re in different places and have different cultural experiences, that doesn’t change the fact that we as black girls are mistreated constantly, whether it be in the workplace or on the set. I certainly have experienced racism in the UK. I’ve experienced it in both places really. That’s my reality.

Q: So, Boris Johnson or Donald Trump?

Q: Next question?

A: Yeah. At this moment in time I feel we’re just digging ourselves a deeper hole. So I feel things have to get worse before they get better. Is that a positive thing?

Q: I guess we need Harriet more than ever.

A: You know I feel like there is no better time for it than now. We need a story of strength. We need a story where a woman in the center is changing things for the better.

Q: Let’s talk about the $20 bill.

A: She should be on (it). I was so incensed when they decided to halt it. I don’t believe the excuse that they’re giving is remotely valid. (Mnuchin said an Obama-era goal to put Tubman on the bill by 2020 was impossible to meet for technical reasons.) I think it’s just another way to thwart progress. And I hope we do get to see her on the $20 bill. She’s earned her right. She was an American hero for goodness’ sakes. She literally earned her stripes and was in the Army for God’s sakes. It’s just nonsense to me that we’re even having to justify why she should be there, because there’s every reason in the book why she should be. What else do you need?

Cynthia Erivo: We Need Harriet Tubman's Story of Strength Right Now

(Fall Preview)

The word came sailing out of a man’s mouth after a screening of Jennifer Kent’s latest movie, “The Nightingale,” at the Venice Film Festival last year. At first Kent thought the livid viewer must be joking: The heroine of “The Nightingale,” an Irish convict in 1820s Tasmania, is called a whore by her tormentors all through the film.

But the man wasn’t joking; he had hollered other angry phrases like “Shame on you!” He turned out to be a journalist and later apologized, and though the festival responded by revoking his credentials, the vitriol directed at Kent and her movie proved a harbinger of reactions to come.

In June, the film made headlines again, after a few dozen people walked out of showings at the Sydney Film Festival, one incensed woman shouting about the film’s portrayal of rape. Others took to Twitter to condemn the brutality borne onscreen by Aboriginal people.

Kent, the auteur of the spooky 2014 breakout hit “The Babadook,” struggled with the reactions as well as the media’s coverage, which she said distorted how Australians received the film. The Sydney Film Festival had added an extra screening to meet heightened ticket demands, critics variously described it as harrowing but essential viewing, and an audience had given it a standing ovation months earlier in Adelaide.

The controversy raised questions about how stories involving rape should be told — and by whom. While depictions of rape on-screen have unleashed storms of criticism in recent years, the debates were about stories almost exclusively created and directed by men. Was Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 feature, “Elle,” starring Isabelle Huppert as a rape victim who becomes attracted to her attacker, misogynistic or feminist? Were the numerous sexual assaults in “Game of Thrones” gratuitous at best? “The Nightingale” was also set in time and place that historians describe as even more grim than the world Kent created onscreen, and several critics praised the film as a rare example of horrific violence done right.

“One way to look at the world is, ‘If I turn away from all the suffering, it doesn’t exist,’” Kent said in a recent Skype interview from her home in Brisbane, Australia. “The other way is to look at it boldly in the face, and let it into your head, and see how it feels, and be motivated to be a more loving, compassionate person.”

In “The Nightingale,” the convict Clare, played by Aisling Franciosi (Lyanna Stark in “Game of Thrones”) sets out into the unforgiving Tasmanian wilderness to avenge atrocities committed against her and her family by an English officer, played by Sam Claflin (the “Hunger Games” films), and his underlings. She is accompanied by an Aboriginal tracker named Billy, played by first-time actor Baykali Ganambarr, whose performance earned the best new talent award in Venice.

The film has been broadly characterized as a revenge tale, but it is more nuanced than that. Revenge tales typically have a catharsis. “The Nightingale” looks at what happens after revenge is exacted, and the toll it takes when you try to rid yourself of pain by inflicting it on others. Kent latched onto these themes in response to a modern-day world filled with outrage and lashing out.

“I wanted to see what are the other options,” she said, “because clearly we’re going to end our humanity if we choose revenge as an option continuously.”

The idea of the story started small, decades ago, when Kent visited Tasmania, off Australia’s southeastern coast, with her first serious boyfriend.

Tasmania is wildly different from the mainland’s vast bushland swaths. It is colder and greener, more like Scotland or Ireland, and, in Kent’s view, suffused with a deep sadness that she wanted to probe.

In the 1800s, female convicts were sent by the shipload to the island, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, usually for far lesser crimes than men. Men also outnumbered them 9 to 1. Visiting a former prison, Kent saw the cold, dark solitary cells where women were confined, in total sensory deprivation, for weeks at time. She learned that after their release, some women deliberately committed crimes to be sent right back in.

“So of course my mind was thinking, ‘What on earth was it that was worse than that, that made them want to flee and return to the darkness?’” Kent said.

Kent worked as an actress and acting teacher for years before turning to filmmaking. After serving as a production assistant on Lars von Trier’s “Dogville,” she made a short film, “Monster” (2005), that she developed into a feature, “The Babadook,” about a widowed mother contending with a demon that has sprung from the pages of her son’s picture book. Though it made just $10 million worldwide, it put Kent on the map not only as a director, but also as an artist who could plumb the recesses of female fury.

“Women’s rage is immense, and there’s an ocean of it,” she said. “It’s not hard, being a woman, to find reasons to have rage.”

To ensure the veracity of “The Nightingale,” she asked Jim Everett, an Aboriginal elder, playwright and activist, to serve as an adviser. He initially said he had no time, but then read the script and couldn’t say no.

“People are realizing this country has a history that has been hidden from it, a history that a lot of people won’t accept,” Everett said, speaking by phone from Tasmania. “They can’t say it’s not there because it’s in the records. This is a discussion that Australia needs to have.”

Everett advised Kent on the body paint, clothes and shell necklaces worn by the indigenous Australian actors, as well as their ceremonies, customs and language. One criticism lobbed at the film was that it was a white empowerment tale propped up by cruelties inflicted on black bodies. Yet Kristyn Harman, an author and professor of Aboriginal history at the University of Tasmania, described British colonial tactics against the Indigenous Australian people of the time as genocidal.

“Tens of thousands were in fact killed,” she said. “Sometimes people boasted of these killings.”

Coverage of the walkouts at the Sydney Film Festival converged on a single line reportedly shouted by a woman as she left the theater: “She’s already been raped, we don’t need to see it again.” For Kent, there was no way to tell a story about what happened to female convicts in colonial Tasmania without including rape. Deborah Swiss, author of “The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia’s Convict Women,” said sexual assault was threaded through their lives. “There was horrific discrimination against the Irish,” Swiss said, “and the convict maids lived in a culture of rape and violence.”

Kent said she did not believe in upholding taboos against talking about or depicting sexual violence on-screen.

“Speaking from my perspective, and having done a lot of research, the way is not to sweep things under the carpet,” Kent continued. “If a woman or anyone who has a painful experience and they can talk about it, that’s a miracle. And that’s all I wanted to say with the film. That ultimately we shouldn’t turn away from these things.”

In preparation for her role, Franciosi spent time with sexual assault victims and worked closely with a psychologist on set. During the rape scenes, Kent kept the camera focused closely on the victim’s face; her intent was to make the viewer experience the violence, too. “What you really have to reckon with is, this is a human being,” Franciosi said.

Some of the scenes left the production crew in tears. Ganambarr said he would hear the screams and cower. After production wrapped, Franciosi canceled travel plans and instead stayed home for two months in Dublin, where she dreamed every night that she was still on set and sometimes woke up crying.

When controversy about the film first swirled, Franciosi took to Twitter in the director’s defense, expressing what both she and Kent would come to believe: that the filmmaker was facing heightened wrath because she was a woman. “Double. Standards.” Franciosi wrote.

At the final, sold-out screening at the Sydney Film Festival, several audience members said they had been drawn in by reports of outraged walkouts at previous showings. This time, though, everyone stayed in their seats. Afterward, several young viewers said the film relayed a version of their country’s history that had never made it into their childhood school books.

“I think it’s a really dark chapter of Australian history that deserves to be read,” said Sarah O’Keefe, 19, a film and communications student at the University of Sydney. She added that she found the violence “graphic but not gratuitous,” and that it was “integral to the plot” and “wholly considerate of the victim.”

“I was shocked, I was confronted, I was horrified,” O’Keefe said. “But I thought it was a fantastic movie.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/movies/rape-film-nightingale.html" id="c1f6982b-9c7b-378f-aac6-a899eb9f2050">The New York Times</a>.

When Rape Onscreen Is Directed by a Woman

“Whore!”

The attendees — agents, celebrities and producers at an invitation-only diversity summit held by the talent agency CAA — took Goss Graves’ message in stride. As it turns out, the industry has already begun shedding one of its longest-held taboos. In recent years, abortions are taking place or being talked about on television at record levels, often on shows created or written by women.

“You’re definitely seeing more of the matter-of-fact ‘I am pregnant, I don’t want to be, I’m going to have an abortion,’” said Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at University of California, San Francisco whose research includes tracking how abortion is characterized on screen. “And it’s gone way up in 2019.”

So far, halfway through the year, nearly two dozen characters in streaming shows, movies and television have had or talked about having abortions, many unapologetically, a development that would have been a unthinkable a decade ago — and one that has angered some abortion foes.

In the pilot for “Shrill,” Abby, the single millennial played by Aidy Bryant, professes to feel “powerful” after having terminated her unplanned pregnancy. On one of the final episodes of “Veep” Anna Chlumsky’s pregnant political aide lays into abortion opponents protesting outside a clinic, hollering, “I even prayed a little, and here I am.” On “She’s Gotta Have It,” the ambitious Clorinda, played by Margot Bingham, defends her decision to the baby’s father, saying anything she does with her body is her choice. Nine of the 11 people credited with writing those episodes were women.

These portrayals, like others on the series “Glow” and “Dear White People,” are a marked departure from how abortion was depicted, or not, in storylines from the ’80s through the early aughts. Characters facing unplanned pregnancies then usually agonized about what to do or, if the show was set in the past, weighed back-alley procedures. Babies were often carried to term or lost to miscarriage. Terminations led to psychological or physical problems or death. It’s not that today’s characters come to their decisions without deliberation, but that they are decisive and forthright, like Becky, the music executive played by Gabourey Sidibe in “Empire.” “My situation is not getting any easier,” she says at one point, “but I have decided to terminate.”

Sisson focuses on television and streaming series that air and run in the United States, along with movies, though some small indie films, she said, might not hit her radar. For 1987, a time of far fewer shows, she counted three depictions of abortion in TV and film: One on “St. Elsewhere,” another on “Dynasty” that led to infertility, and the botched procedure in “Dirty Dancing” that left the dance instructor played by Cynthia Rhodes gravely hurt.

But for 2018, Sisson found 18 instances of characters having, disclosing, considering or mentioning abortions. A little more than halfway through 2019, that figure was already at 21, and Sisson expects this year to match or outpace her tally from 2017, when the figure hit a high of 34.

That more characters are having abortions with fewer regrets jibes with research in the United States. Women who have had abortions overwhelmingly say they made the right decision, according to a study released in 2015. In another example of art beginning to imitate life, more onscreen characters of color are opting for the procedure. Sisson pointed to the effect of Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, having an abortion a few years ago on “Scandal.” (Shonda Rhimes told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that she was pressured by ABC to cut the scene but held firm; ABC would not comment.) “Shonda Rhimes opened it up so it can be on network prime,” Sisson said.

Still, the recent surge in abortion storylines tends to be clustered on cable and streaming shows, and with the explosion of new series, it is unclear how much the percentage of depictions has changed as a whole.

“In terms of narrative broadcast prime time, over four years, it’s been pretty thin,” said Kate Langrall Folb, director of Hollywood, Health &amp; Society, an initiative at the University of Southern California promoting accurate representation of health issues.

In addition, Sisson said that the use of Plan B contraception is not widely portrayed, and that adverse outcomes are still depicted on shows that are set before Roe v. Wade. There are also scant shows that focus on abortion providers, though a movie is in the works starring Michelle Williams as an underground abortionist before Roe vs. Wade.

Lara Shapiro, a writer whose credits include “The Americans” (she is also an acquaintance of this reporter), said producers repeatedly passed on a television pilot she wrote about a fictional ’60s-era Roman Catholic doctor who reluctantly performs an abortion; the script itself opened the door to other jobs. “People like to read something that’s provocative, but when it comes to putting themselves on the line, they have advertisers and politics and subscribers to answer to,” Shapiro said.

That might change. Sisson found that the number of portrayals on television ticked up as more states and politicians sought to limit women’s access to abortion and birth control.

For some creators and writers, the connection with current politics is explicit. Lindy West, a creator of “Shrill” (she is also a contributing op-ed writer to The New York Times) has said that normalizing abortion was of foremost importance; she also started the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion.

Yet Rachel Axler, a co-executive producer on “Veep,” said she and the other writers had been prompted to write in an abortion not because of the news cycle, but because it made most sense for Chlumsky’s character. “For this character, this was absolutely the right thing to do,” Axler said.

A 2018 episode of “Claws” similarly turned the tables on abortion opponents while also delving into competing perspectives. After Virginia, the nail technician played by Karrueche Tran, gets pregnant, characters weighed in via a Brady Bunch-style split screen. In the end, Virginia is accompanied to a clinic by her loving boyfriend. On the way out, the boyfriend tells gathered protesters, “We’re getting married, everybody!” eliciting cheers. One abortion protester cries, “God is good; he heard our prayers!” But Virginia snaps back, “We still D-and-C’ed that.”

Janine Sherman Barrois, the “Claws” showrunner, said the writers wanted to show Virginia making the decision and getting on with her day. “Maybe it’s part of the zeitgeist, but I think it came naturally out of a room of writers who’ve grown up seeing how we’ve progressed,” Barrois said.

West, Axler and Barrois all said they received no pushback from the networks and studios producing their shows.

Hollywood’s apparent normalization of abortion has aggravated but not surprised abortion foes, among them Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, who wrote and directed the 2019 feature “Unplanned,” based on the memoir of a clinical director at Planned Parenthood who became an anti-abortion activist.

“Hollywood’s run by the left,” said Solomon, “You won’t see pro-life stories on TV.”

Solomon and Konzelman said they did not bother approaching Hollywood financiers or studios to make “Unplanned,” which they produced in secrecy. They said that TV networks refused to run ads for the film, which was initially listed as “propaganda” on Google.

“Unplanned” has since earned more than $18 million in the United States, and is enjoying brisk ticket sales in Canada despite meeting resistance there. “A vacuum has been created, and those people that believe other than what the left believes are outraged, and they feel like they’re being silenced,” Solomon said.

Another filmmaker, Nick Loeb, who directed the forthcoming “Roe v. Wade,” echoed the notion that Hollywood was neglecting swaths of anti-abortion Americans at its economic peril. Loeb, who is also known for his legal fight with his former partner Sofia Vergara over frozen embryos, said distributors have already made offers, sight unseen, for his film, which stars Jon Voight, Stacey Dash, and Loeb as the anti-abortion activist Bernard Nathanson.

“Nobody’s speaking for us, Hollywood doesn’t speak for us,” Loeb said of those who oppose abortion, “But when people make movies for us, they’re loved and they’re adored.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/abortion-hollywood.html" id="e3d2dfbd-8352-3d59-aa3a-863d9cb341a0">The New York Times</a>.

At a recent conference outside Los Angeles, a national women’s rights lawyer stood before a select group of Hollywood heavyweights to issue a demand and a plea. With a woman’s right to choose in jeopardy, the lawyer, Fatima Goss Graves, said, more abortions should be portrayed in narratives on screen. “The stories on abortion do not match our reality,” she said.

As America Debates Abortion, Hollywood Seeks the Realities

<h1>The two young women see themselves in Rue, the stumbling, manipulative teenage drug addict that Zendaya plays in “Euphoria,” the new HBO show.</h1>

They see themselves in Rue when she coughs and flushes the toilet so her mom won’t hear her rummaging through the medicine cabinet for Xanax. They see themselves when Rue cops clean urine from a high school friend to pass a drug test.

Cara Buckley

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