Phoebe Reilly

In the series, debuting Sunday, Zendaya stars as Rue, a high school junior committed to numbing herself with vodka and whatever drugs she can get her hands on, after a failed stint in rehab. Between bouts of unconsciousness, she narrates a dark, graphically depicted world in which the local dealers have barely hit puberty, fentanyl is rampant and her classmates’ sex is not only casual but frequently documented. “It’s 2019: Nudes are the currency of love,” Rue explains in the first episode.

Based on the Israeli series of the same name and executive produced by Drake, “Euphoria” is a rare foray into teen drama for HBO. Creator and showrunner Sam Levinson (son of filmmaker Barry) drew on his own troubled adolescence to tell the story, which channels earlier raw teen tales like “Kids” and “Skins” while tackling contemporary realities like active-shooter drills and revenge porn.

“It’s a scary jump,” Zendaya said of the show. “But I think it was time for me to do this.”

She is confident the “Euphoria” audience is unlikely to overlap with Disney’s target demographic. “I don’t think any of my 8-year-old fans know” that this show exists, she said, smiling. “If they do, I don’t think their parents will let them watch it.”

Born in Oakland, California, to schoolteacher parents, Zendaya (last name Coleman) landed her first Disney gig in 2010 at age 13. When she wasn’t playing an aspiring dancer on “Shake It Up,” and later a spy in “K.C. Undercover,” she was busy building a slim but exciting résumé.

In “Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017), her deceptively small part as Peter Parker’s sarcastic classmate Michelle led to a third-act twist that unmasked her as the franchise’s infamous love interest, MJ. Zendaya reignites the chemistry with her superhero co-star Tom Holland in the forthcoming sequel “Spider-Man: Far From Home.” She also delivered a nimble, exuberant performance as a trapeze artist in the movie-musical “The Greatest Showman” (2017).

By mid-2018, after wrapping her eight-year run on the Disney Channel with the “K.C. Undercover” finale, Zendaya found herself worried about her next project for the first time in almost a decade. Then she read the pilot script for “Euphoria.”

“I knew if I wasn’t a part of this show, I’d be miserable,” she said.

At the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, Zendaya, 22, collapsed on a couch. The stylish actress had spent a long day in maroon velvet stilettos, but she was still eager to talk about why she wanted this role so badly and whether she would be able to break Rue’s more vulgar habits in time for the “Spider-Man” press tour.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Did “Euphoria” appeal to you because it was such a break from Disney?

A: There was no strategic plan. After shooting “The Greatest Showman” and “Spider-Man,” I went back to my Disney show, which is kind of like going to college and then having to go back and do the same grade over and over again. Not that I didn’t appreciate having a job. But it’s like you turn a switch on and do it, and then you get turned off and go home. I wanted more. Upon talking to Sam and finding out that Rue is really an incarnation of him and his battles with addiction and depression and a multitude of other things that everyone deals with, it made sense why I connected with her.

Q: You don’t do drugs. What do you have in common with Rue?

A: I feel like she’s a version of myself with different choices and circumstances. Rue is a good person; she just doesn’t know it. She’s in pain. There’s something innocent and redeeming about her that reminds you that she’s a human first and an addict second.

Q: Is the intent of the show to be deliberately provocative?

A: I don’t find it that shocking, to be honest. People will. I kind of accepted the fact that it would be polarizing. I found a little calm in that. Whether people like it or not, it’s real. I’m telling somebody’s story. Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening all the time, every day. It’s hard for me to speak on addiction because it’s not something I have dealt with directly. But I still had friends who were dealing with things, and I had to help them through it.

Q: Were you nervous to step into a role this dark and occasionally graphic?

A: I was really nervous because I wanted to do well. It’s like going from nothing to everything — there were no steps in between. That’s why people think it’s such a stretch for me to play this character. There’s a lot of people who probably think I can’t do it because they don’t truly understand my personality. And I get it: I’m a Disney kid. There’s a lot to prove.

Sam told me I was on a mood board he made for Rue, and I didn’t believe him because I felt like there’s no way he’s seen anything that I’ve done. He took a risk on me, but he doesn’t see it that way. He would always say, “Yo, Z, I’m not worried about you.” I appreciate that.

Q: How did you come to trust Sam to handle your onscreen relationship with Hunter Schafer, who plays Jules, one of the first major transgender characters to appear in a high school drama?

A: Anybody who meets or talks to Sam feels a sense of comfort around him. He’s a very open book. I’m glad that he wrote himself as me because he could’ve written it as a white dude, and then I would never have the opportunity to play a character like this. He directs most of the episodes, but if he’s not directing, we have all female directors, which is great. He’s also very collaborative and allowed us to fuse our experiences and our feelings into the character. Sam and Hunter have had long, in-depth conversations about life. And Hunter is an angel of a human. She’s brilliant. It’s not hard to be in love with her onscreen.

Q: Your movie career got off to an impressive start with “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” Even though your part was small, did you know from the start that your character was MJ?

A: Yeah, I talked to the director [Jon Watts] prior to auditioning, and he said she gets bigger as the thing goes on. I was like: “Dope. I’m here for the long game.” I didn’t know she was going to be the sarcastic introvert. She’s a very guarded person and she doesn’t let a lot of people in. In the first movie, we just saw her shell. We kind of explore the softer sides of her in this upcoming one. Now she has to be more vulnerable because she likes Peter.

Q: You pushed back against the Disney Channel’s original plan for “K.C. Undercover” — you wanted to be a producer, you wanted the title changed from “Super Awesome Katy,” you wanted to feature a family of color. Did you feel Disney needed to develop more diverse female characters?

A: Yeah, 1,000 percent. It was very necessary. It was either they did it, or I didn’t do it. It’s understanding your worth. If you’re in a place where you can move the needle, then do it. I’ve been able to help show the young Disney kids other paths to go. So hopefully it makes it a little easier to make that kid-to-grown-up transition that everybody puts all this emphasis on.

Q: Have you already noticed a change in the types of roles you’re being offered?

A: I still get the corny stuff. It’s cool. I feel like I can do [“Euphoria”] and still have another world outside of it where I can do family movies and fun things like that. I’m trying to break the habit of using the F-word now because I use it so much as Rue, and in life. I’m about to go on tour for “Spider-Man.” It’s a wonderful family movie. I can’t be dropping F-bombs.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/arts/television/zendaya-euphoria-hbo.html" id="63504e16-7836-3e4a-a4cd-f3cd6701fe5c">The New York Times</a>.

It’s been only 16 months since Zendaya took her final bow on the Disney Channel, but her new HBO series, “Euphoria,” makes one thing clear: The parent-approved portion of her TV career is already ancient history.

No longer slal sweetness and light

“This is the gothest night,” she whispered.

A first-name-only artist who has been steadily releasing music for the past decade, Tamaryn, 37, appreciated Mother Nature’s cooperative stage direction: Between claps of thunder, lightning illuminated the stained-glass windows and the candlelit altar bearing a dagger and a single pink rose.

“It’s not my religion,” she explained. “This is a journey I’m learning about. In 10 years, I might say it’s hocus-pocus.”

Tamaryn’s fascination with mysticism largely stems from her fourth album, “Dreaming the Dark,” which is due on Friday and finds her confronting childhood memories in unexpected ways.

Raised by her mother and godmother, both Jungian psychologists, along with a nomadic group of bohemian types who moved around New Zealand and, later, the western United States, Tamaryn said she frequently witnessed a form of therapy involving ritual theater. Participants would inhabit roles from the tarot deck’s Major Arcana — the 22 pictorial cards (like the Empress and the Devil) that in certain interpretations overlap with Carl Jung’s notion of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

“I don’t think I ever thought it was normal,” she said over dinner a few days later during an intense conversation that spanned several hours. A lace maroon top covered her black bustier, and a glow-in-the-dark cross dangled from one ear. “But they basically instilled the idea that creativity is a route to heal,” she continued, “and that applies in such a huge way to my life now.”

Since leaving home at 13, Tamaryn, born Tamaryn Brown, has spoken only sporadically to her mother. (She never met her late father, but knows he was a competitive bridge player.) Before settling in Los Angeles three years ago, she lived in San Francisco and New York. Denizens of the Lower East Side in the rapidly gentrifying early aughts might have bumped into her at Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks Place, where she was a salesclerk (“I would sit there and listen to Lydia Lunch really loud,” she said), or behind the bar at the similarly defunct club Tonic, where she also performed one-off shows with various outfits.

“Dreaming the Dark” is her first album since the 2015 LP “Cranekiss,” both of which were written and produced alongside Jorge Elbrecht, known for his collaborations with Ariel Pink. Driven by lushly orchestrated synths and emotionally intense vocals, the record’s nine songs invoke a range of influences, including Sisters of Mercy, the composer Angelo Badalamenti and Kanye West circa “808s &amp; Heartbreak.” (She said she specifically wanted to mimic “the whipping sounds” from Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant” for the industrial number “Victim Complex.”)

The intentionally low-budget music videos that she’s been directing have, in psychoanalytic parlance, unlocked her subconscious. She realized she was relying heavily on tarot imagery — for instance, casting herself as the Moon upon a crescent-shaped swing for “Angels of Sweat.”

“I didn’t come up with this concept,” she said. “It revealed itself to me.”

She acknowledged that her approach might sound “woo-woo,” but she doesn’t care. From an early age, Tamaryn was encouraged to be wary of the mainstream. “When I was 7, my godmother saw me dancing super sexy in front of the TV to the ‘Solid Gold’ dancers,” she said. “She was like, ‘That’s not the only way to dance.’ She took me into her room, put on Kate Bush’s ‘The Dreaming,’ and was like, ‘No one’s watching you, move any way that makes sense to the music.'”

Despite attracting critically positive notices since her 2010 debut LP “The Waves,” Tamaryn has not had a breakout moment and has supplemented her income with various jobs. For a spell in 2013, she helped the Dum Dum Girls with general creative direction, scoring the interstitial music to a video written by Bret Easton Ellis for their song “Are You Okay?” She has also built step-and-repeats for red-carpet events and worked in the shipping department of a perfume company.

“There’s this myth that you’re a failure if you have to have a job,” she said, casually tugging at the fringed bangs of her crimson-red hair. “I kind of feel the opposite. I feel you should keep your creativity as uncompromised as you can.”

“The Waves” and its 2012 follow-up, “Tender New Signs,” both recorded with guitarist Rex John Shelverton, proudly embraced the atmospheric soundscapes and washed-out vocals of their shoegaze roots. But eventually, according to Tamaryn, “I could have put out a straight-up disco song, and somebody would say that it was pushing the boundaries of shoegaze.” She laughed.

She intended “Cranekiss” to be the “first statement that I’m no longer a band working within certain parameters.” She switched up her collaborators, bringing in Elbrecht, a member of the art collective Lansing-Drieden, and Shaun Durkan from the Bay Area noise-pop band Weekend.

“She was really precise with what she wanted,” Elbrecht said. “It’s pretty crucial to her to have a certain melancholic feeling.”

The “Cranekiss” centerpiece “Hands All Over Me” earned her a fan in Sky Ferreira, who Tamaryn said later asked her to do some writing. The album also impressed musician Mariqueen Maandig Reznor, who praised Tamaryn’s “talent and good taste” in an email, adding that she has played the LP “every other day for the last four years. I was unsure if I would ever stop consistently listening to it, but now I have ‘Dreaming the Dark,’ and have it on rotation obsessively.”

But following “Cranekiss,” she took a break from music. Craving stability — a quest that, as a child, led her to figure skate competitively, she said — she went to school to be hair colorist. She ended up traveling to Japan as a hair model, donning rainbow-colored extensions and performing David Bowie songs at various events.

“I thought I was quitting touring to settle down and get a trade and then it’s like, no, I’m literally dressed as a mermaid singing ‘Life on Mars,'” she said.

At the same time, she was mourning her friend, celebrity photographer Matt Irwin, who killed himself in 2016. “The last conversation I had with him was about a toxic relationship that he couldn’t get over,” she said. “It was a wake-up call.” “Dreaming the Dark” is dedicated to him.

Sensing it was time to return to music, Tamaryn connected with a young Vegas-based musician named Jordan Collins through Instagram who inspired her to write some demos with him about her own unhealthy relationships. “A lot of things on this record I can’t say to other people, because I shouldn’t talk to those people,” she said.

And in early 2018, she reconvened with Elbrecht, who pushed her to explore “the pop quality” of her vocal range, he said. “She could really get up high and project.” As a result, many of her new songs, like the standout “Path to Love,” share a similar theatricality with her formative inspiration, Kate Bush.

“It could be emotionally draining to listen to it all the way through,” she said, with a laugh.

She is already at work on a follow-up EP, and will spend the spring touring South America and Europe. Tamaryn does not expect to quit her latest day job — a freelance gig narrating erotic audiobooks — at the moment, but that’s OK. “I just want to look back and be able to mark the different eras of my life by the records I made,” she said. “That’s the only real goal.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="0f102172-8ec8-4091-beb4-c417579583e9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/arts/music/tamaryn-dreaming-the-dark.html">The New York Times</a>.

In Music and in Life, Tamaryn Dreams in the Dark

LOS ANGELES — On a rainy March evening, singer-songwriter Tamaryn waited for a gnostic priest to begin his lecture on the transformative power of tarot at a small lodge in the Hollywood Hills.

In music and in life, Tamaryn dreams in the dark

This article originally appeared in <a id="41ca06d2-1514-4283-8009-8ba290c2ba5b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/arts/music/tamaryn-dreaming-the-dark.html">The New York Times</a>.

It was a morbid anniversary: Seventy-two years before, Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress known later as the Black Dahlia, was brutally murdered and dismembered, possibly in the bowels of the mansion where they now sat — the Sowden House, built by Lloyd Wright (a son of Frank’s). It was home briefly to George Hodel, a prominent gynecologist who was widely suspected of the murder.

Pine was familiar with the story. Fresh off their success with “Wonder Woman,” in which Pine starred under Jenkins’ direction, the two of them had filmed a TV project here in 2017 tied to the Black Dahlia murder of 1947.

“I got a little nauseous,” she said about visiting the house’s basement. “And dizzy.”

A dizzying setting, perhaps, but appropriate for the project she was filming, which debuts Monday: “I Am the Night,” a six-episode limited series on TNT starring Pine that is loosely based on the 2008 memoir “One Day She’ll Darken” by Hodel’s granddaughter, Fauna Hodel. A noir-soaked mystery set in 1965, the series is a return to TV for Jenkins and the realization of a passion project more than a decade in the making.

Jenkins first became interested in bringing Hodel’s story to the screen in 2008 when a mutual friend introduced the two women. “She laid on me the most incredible true story,” Jenkins said of that first encounter with Hodel, who went on to become a close friend. “And I was just so completely blown away by it that I couldn’t stop thinking about it and talking about it.”

A white girl raised by her adoptive black mother to believe she was of mixed racial origins, Hodel had a difficult upbringing in Nevada, unaware of her true background. In search of her biological mother, she traveled to Los Angeles — only then to discover her family’s shadowy past. Vanity Fair later called her memoir “the stuff of which movies are made.”

Jenkins agreed, originally conceiving of the project as a film — at one point, Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions was attached. But the material proved ultimately too dense for a feature, and the project sat in limbo. The idea of the limited series wasn’t as “chic,” she said, before the success in 2014 of HBO’s “True Detective.”

With the blockbuster success of “Wonder Woman” in 2017, which earned nearly $822 million, Jenkins’ career reached new heights. “Wonder Woman” gave her leverage, but that achievement also made it somewhat surprising that “Night” landed at a basic-cable network better known for sitcoms and procedurals.

“I don’t see anything as too minor or too major,” said Jenkins, who followed up her Oscar-winning debut feature, “Monster,” by directing episodes of “Arrested Development” on Fox. “I like to do things I believe could be great. Not only did TNT get it, but they were excited about it.”

The network happily accommodated the short window she had at the end of 2017 to direct the first two episodes. She then handed the directorial reins over to Victoria Mahoney (“Seven Seconds”) and Carl Franklin (“Devil in a Blue Dress”) and left to begin preproduction on “Wonder Woman 1984,” scheduled for release in 2020.

The episodes this team created for “I Am the Night” are heavily fictionalized, though based on Hodel’s gripping memoir. In the pilot, a teenage version of Hodel (India Eisley) is presented as a Little Red Riding Hood in search of her grandfather. As all manner of wolves close in, she befriends Pine’s character, Jay Singletary, a once-promising journalist whose career has been destroyed by George Hodel (Jefferson Mays).

Pine, who played the love interest in “Wonder Woman,” jumped at the chance to work again with Jenkins, who first told him about the project on the set of “Wonder Woman” in 2016.

“She always has myriad ideas that she’s bandying about that she’ll see if I respond to,” said Pine, who has spent nearly half of the past three years working on projects with Jenkins. “But this particular one she got really excited about.”

Pine got excited, too. Like Jenkins, he is an executive producer on the series. And his character, a drug addicted Korean War veteran who’s been reduced to the tabloid hustle, presented new challenges.

“Jay is freakishly, fascinatingly, delightfully strange,” he said. “I have a greater compassion for him than I have for many of the characters I’ve played because he’s so tragic.”

Shot on location around Los Angeles, the series examines issues of identity, corruption and truth, as focused through a noir lens appropriate to its themes. As Fauna tracks her family, she also unearths the suspicions about her grandfather’s possible role in the Dahlia and other murders.

Jenkins felt that the Black Dahlia mystery — which remains unsolved, possiblybecause of George Hodel’s powerful connections — was the show’s “Trojan Horse”: The killer’s identity was reportedly one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets, and it became just one of Fauna’s — both real and fictional — many painful discoveries.

“Nobody can prove exactly what happened to the Black Dahlia, but the people involved with this story uncovered incredible complexities about themselves,” Jenkins said.

“I Am the Night” is the first proper collaboration between Jenkins and her husband, author Sam Sheridan (“A Fighter’s Heart”). It was Sheridan, a noir fan and the series’s showrunner, who thought to cast Pine, who had played the comely Captain Kirk in “Star Trek,” as the troubled journalist.

The suggestion appealed to Jenkins, who saw Jay’s desperation and gallows humor as a refreshing change for her friend.

“This character had shades of Chris that I hadn’t gotten to see him express,” said Jenkins. “It’s getting into that vibe of somebody who really doesn’t like themselves and their place in the world. When he was super young, he always had to play the handsome leading man.”

Seated together in a small windowless room of the Sowden House, Pine and Jenkins exuded unmistakable chemistry. (“You end up with a shorthand,” Jenkins observed. “That’s why we were able to work so fast.”) He teasingly wondered if the built-in aquarium reminded her of her deceased pet Fishtopher.

“Patty has a relationship to fish that one would have with a dog or a cat,” he joked. She waggled her fingers around her face to illustrate how the Japanese fighting fish used to greet her. They erupted with laughter.

Their tight working relationship was quickly forged on the set of “Wonder Woman.” Jenkins explained that it had been extremely challenging to cast the part of Wonder Woman’s love interest, Steve Trevor, whom she felt was often neutered in previous, primarily male interpretations.

“Imagine if Lois Lane was dull as dishwater?” she said. “We’re making a movie for women, as well, this time. I was looking for someone hilarious and cool, but who also had a funny dynamic with emasculation, in a way that made it a two-hander.”

Pine had turned down the “Wonder Woman” role in 2015 when another director was attached. But within five minutes of meeting with Jenkins, who acted out an abridged version of the film as part of her pitch, he was sold. (He is reprising the role in the sequel.)

“Long story short, I like Patty,” he said. “She sees me the way I want to be seen.”

Jenkins has become a dependable teller of gruesome tales about women and violence. In addition to “Monster,” based on the life of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, she also directed the somber pilot for AMC’s whodunit drama “The Killing.” What captivated her most about Hodel’s story, though, was not its sordid nature, but Hodel’s resilience and joy.

“I’m a filmmaker because I’m interested in people and what is possible in this world,” she said.

Hodel, who had breast cancer, did not get to see the project completed: She died in September 2017, having read only the pilot script. Her daughters, however, Rasha Pecoraro and Yvette Gentile, were granted generous access to the set during production.

“It brought mom back to life for us,” Gentile said.

Their podcast, “Root of Evil,” debuts Feb. 13 and will further explore events from the family’s perspective. The podcast will feature tape-recorded interviews with family members conducted by Hodel, who continued to search for answers all her life.

Jenkins said she wanted to believe her friend would have liked the series.

“It’s always the thing I am most nervous about, with anybody’s true story,” she said. “We tried to honor the truth of her character as much as we could. Hopefully her wonderful spirit permeated everything.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/television/i-am-the-night-black-dahlia.html" id="2e861262-15b0-3748-a2fc-2181cc0ab70e">The New York Times</a>.

'I Am the Night': Patty Jenkins and Chris Pine Explore the Black Dahlia Mystery

LOS ANGELES — “Do you know what today is?” asked Patty Jenkins on a rainy Tuesday in January. Chris Pine shook his head.

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Phoebe Reilly

Articles written by the author

No longer slal sweetness and light

In music and in life, Tamaryn dreams in the dark

In music and in life, Tamaryn dreams in the dark

'I Am the Night': Patty Jenkins and Chris Pine Explore the Black Dahlia Mystery