Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i Vanity Fair

On Sunday, March 15, Los Angeles announced the first phase of a stay-at-home order across the city. The following morning, Vanity Fair was scheduled to photograph Schitt’s Creek star Catherine O’Hara in L.A. Our photo team was suddenly confronted with two pressing questions: When could the shoot take place? And how? Before long, when and how became standard prompts for more than just photo shoots. In collaboration with some of photography’s most creative minds, V.F.’s June issue features portraits taken by drone and from more than 10,000 miles away through screens—fitting, perhaps, for an issue devoted to television. Throughout this magazine’s history, photographic portraiture has been an inherently intimate enterprise: photographer, subject, and stylist collaborating in person, in real time. To retain that intimacy in a moment of social distancing…

SOUL SISTERS “We want to inspire more girls to pick up guitars, write, produce, and engineer,” says Danielle Haim of the L.A.-based band HAIM, who release their third studio album this summer. “We’re songwriters,” she adds, “but we’re also a rock band; it’s where we feel most ourselves.” The album, with the wry title Women in Music Pt. III, features songs written by all three Haim sisters—Danielle, Este, and Alana, who adds: “We’re always writing, especially when we aren’t touring. Danielle gets some of her best song ideas when we’re on an airplane about to take off; [this time] we had the best time experimenting with different sounds. This is the most confident we’ve ever felt on a record.” BOTH SIDES NOW Singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding releases her new album this…

CYNICS SAY THAT nothing lasts in Hollywood—starlets fade, studio heads survive until they don’t. But the dining has been pretty reliable, at least in type, of which there are two: those longtime institutions or hotel dining rooms always happy to remind you that Frank Sinatra, Joan Collins, or Arnold Schwarzenegger have eaten there; and the low-lit den or rooftop restaurants, often with monosyllabic names, that smell of freshly dried paint and offer airline-quality American cooking with optional truffle fries while a dozen paparazzi lie in wait for a Kardashian. But now Hollywood, a community immune to harsh realities like freezing winters and picking up your own dry cleaning, is in suspended animation, just like everywhere else. And while Angelenos are unnerved by the daily devastation around the world—and applauding the…

WHAT IF “THE ONE Where Monica and Chandler Sleep Together” didn’t exist? Okay, fine, there’s no Friends episode with that name; the prosaic title of the episode in which Monica and Chandler wake up in bed together is “The One With Ross’s Wedding, Part 2.” And whether Friends was part of your recent social distancing self-care regimen or you watched that half hour live in 1998, the sheepish, stunned look on the characters’ faces is probably still etched into your memory. What nobody remembers is that their fling—which turned into much more—was revealed in Friends’ 97th episode. And the real shocker is that if the comedy debuted today, the chances of it nearing 100 episodes—let alone having an eventual run of 236 installments—would be vanishingly remote. Speaking of pivotal romantic…

IN 1999, WHEN The Sopranos electrified pop culture, people wondered if TV could maybe someday be as engrossing and artful a medium as the movies. It’s hard to imagine that kind of naivete now, but we were also freaking out about Y2K. Vanity Fair asked a dozen actors whose performances have impressed us this year to collaborate on photo shoots that would both celebrate the ever-higher peaks of Peak TV and chronicle this unnerving moment of self-isolation. Here, you will find Sarah Snook, whose turn as Shiv Roy in Succession is a delicious portrait of a woman who wants her vicious father’s approval so much that she is almost willing to become him. You’ll find Zoë Kravitz, who delivers a magnetic, career high of a performance in High Fidelity, as well…

ARROW The CW Once upon a time, Greg Berlanti took little-known DC Comics hero Oliver Queen and created a wildly successful franchise. The so-called Arrowverse now includes five spin-offs—and counting. Queen may have hung up his bow and quiver, but his legacy could prove immortal. EMPIRE Fox Lee Daniels’s prime-time soap put Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard at the head of the fractious Lyon family, music moguls with big ambitions. The show was a cultural touchstone, scandal or not. Empire never decided if Cookie and Lucious loved or hated each other, but it didn’t matter: They were family. GLOW Netflix Jenji Kohan’s ’80s wrestling comedy took a crew of misfits—led by Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin—and subjected them to a curmudgeonly failed director played by Marc Maron. The wrestlers…

IN 2008, I WAS on the phone with my friend’s younger brother when the news broke that Tim Russert had died. I didn’t have much of a relationship with my friend’s younger brother and can’t remember why we were on the phone in the first place. Perhaps we were planning a surprise party. Perhaps an intervention. Perhaps both. “Oh, man,” Jack interrupted himself, “Tim Russert just died.” “For the rest of my life,” I said, “You’ll be the one who told me that.” About a week later, Jack’s name appeared on my screen, followed by the words George Carlin. Bernie Mac, I fired back. This is how the game began, innocently enough. This is also, somewhat miraculously, how it continued. For the past 12 years, every time a person of…

A FEW YEARS AGO on the way home from summer vacation in Rhode Island, my husband and I began discussing the possibility of leaving New York. It wasn’t that we wanted to go somewhere else. It was that we had lived here as adults for 20 years, and the sedimentary buildup of experience had begun to weigh on us. I sometimes felt, I confessed to him, as if I was living in an archaeological dig of my own past. When you have spent two decades in the city, you remember not only the restaurant that used to be in the spot where a new restaurant just opened, but the one that was there two restaurants ago; the nostalgia can pull you under. I still missed Grange Hall, which closed in 2004. I missed…

“AM I GOING to be okay?” That’s what a friend texted Susannah Grant within 45 minutes of beginning Grant’s acclaimed Netflix miniseries Unbelievable, about a string of sexual assault cases investigated by two detectives who drag a serial rapist to justice. If you haven’t yet braved the series—anchored by Toni Collette and Merritt Wever as the detective dream team and Kaitlyn Dever as a rape victim who’s further undone by local authorities—you too may be wondering whether you can handle it. Let Grant reassure you, as she did her friend: “I’m never interested in stories of relentless despair. I do believe in bravely looking into the dark corners of our society—but never without hope.” The show is based on “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a gripping, infuriating article from ProPublica…

CATHERINE O’HARA IS too gracious, too self-effacing—in short, too Canadian—to brag about the effect she has on people, but you don’t have to look far to find someone who’s happy to do it for her. Martin Short, for instance, remembers being mid-conversation with Tom Ford and Anjelica Huston at a small dinner party in Los Angeles a few years back when his friend Catherine came through the door. “Anjelica went completely still,” he says. “She said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, I’ve got to meet her, I’ve got to meet her.’ It was like Paul McCartney walking in in 1965.” O’Hara’s devotees don’t just admire the arc of her career, they dote over all the tiny comedic choices—a character’s limp, say, or her drowsy scorn, or her melodramatic way…

STEPHEN KING DIDN’T call his novel The Virus. He didn’t call it The Disease or The End of the World As We Know It or anything that nihilistic. He wanted his 1978 book about a global pandemic that takes all but a fraction of human life with it to be called The Stand. When there are no rules, his thinking went, survivors have to make a choice: Do you go full Darwin and indulge dark, selfish instincts or do what’s right for the sake of others? “I wanted to write about bravery,” says King. “At some point, people do have to make a stand.” The novel remains one of the author’s greatest achievements, and a new limited series adaptation—the first since 1994—is headed to CBS All Access later this year…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being at home, watching a good movie with my husband. Dining out with good friends. What is your greatest fear? Fear. Which living person do you most admire? Both Obamas. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Bigotry. Narcissism. What is your greatest extravagance? My Toto toilet. What is your favorite journey? Coming home. On what occasion do you lie? When it might hurt someone to tell the truth. Which living person do you most despise? The one who thinks only of himself. (Fill in the blank.) Which words or phrases do you most overuse? I’m so glad we had this time together. What or who is the greatest love of your life? My husband. Which talent would you most like to…

In the Netflix docuseries that follows the cheer squad of Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, 20-year-old Harris became a breakout star for his indefatigable jubilance and characteristic “mat talk”—shouts of encouragement to pump up teammates. Here, the beloved underdog turned Hollywood hero shares quarantine motivation, memories from his first Oscar night, and what’s next for Navarro. HIS PASSION began “at a very young age. We never had the most money and I lost my mom at 16, but cheer has become my family. It has made me the person I am today.” WHEN NETFLIX first arrived at Navarro, some teammates turned it on for the cameras—“girls wanted makeup, guys wanted a haircut”—but not Harris: “I wasn’t going to just change the way I look, absolutely not!” THE SHOW catapulted Harris…

If you loved recent best-picture winner Parasite, you may want to check out the new series Snowpiercer (TNT), which is based on an earlier film from Parasite director Bong Joon Ho. Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs star. (For more on the movie’s reconception as a series, turn to page 92.) If Tiger King and other true-crime twists and turns haven’t left you sated, Netflix’s dark comedy Dead to Me has returned for a second season. It’s a fictional thriller that’s just as gripping as fact, and its star Christina Applegate has never been better. If you’re celebrating the 35th anniversary of Les Mis on the West End (and were team La La Land at the 2017 Oscars), try The Eddy, a Netflix musical series set in Paris by La La…

BEFORE THE CORONAVIRUS, the greatest threat to our sense of normalcy was Donald Trump. The president’s fickle governance, racist language, and childish way of punishing his perceived enemies aroused both admiration and fear in the electorate, which has been at furious odds throughout his administration. As is fitting for a reality star turned president, TV has been home to much of our national discourse. At first, the “Trump bump” was a phenomenon for late-night talk shows and cable news—an addictive, maddening, never-ending cycle of outrage and frustration. But what talking heads like to call “the current climate” soon began to bubble up in scripted shows. It’s difficult to imagine, for example, Michael Schur’s earnest sitcom The Good Place becoming the cultural touchstone it has were it not for the pleasant…

ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, March 19, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office obsessing over the beaches in Florida. CNN footage of shirtless spring breakers packed onto the sand while the coronavirus pandemic raged sparked national outrage—and pressure on Trump to act. The next morning New York governor Andrew Cuomo would announce strict stay-at-home orders for residents, but Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, refused to close his state’s beaches, a position even Florida’s Republican senator Rick Scott called reckless. “Lots of people were telling Trump to lean on Ron,” a Trump adviser said. Trump’s view of the situation was complicated, though. For weeks, his top medical advisers, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been hectoring him about the seriousness of the crisis and the necessity of swift…

THE TRAIN IS 1,001 cars long. It never stops moving. It’s carrying the last remnants of human life on a frost-covered earth, and it’s strictly divided by the haves and havenots, with the poorest, most desperate people clinging to life in the tail section and the elites living lives of luxury up front When Oscar-winning Parasite filmmaker Bong Joon Ho turned a French graphic novel into the 2013 movie Snowpiercer, the train became a relentless metaphor for class warfare. Work on transforming the story for TV began in 2015, but it was an arduous process involving a reshot pilot, a switch to showrunner Graeme Manson (Orphan Black), and intensive work to figure out how to tell an expansive new story. The answer to the mystery? To make the new Snowpiercer…

BOWEN YANG WAS VOTED “Most Likely to be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live” by his high school classmates in Aurora, Colorado—a superlative that proved prophetic in 2019, when the iconic sketch series promoted him from writer to performer. The son of Chinese scientists who immigrated first to Australia and then Canada and the United States, Yang is the first Chinese American cast member in SNL’s 45-year history. But Yang—who brings verve to characters as varied as Kim Jong-un, a gratingly upbeat SoulCycle instructor, and saucy trade representative Trade Daddy—still believes the writer is king within the Studio 8H ecosystem. “They basically produce the sketches as soon as they get pitched,” says Yang, who has cowritten “GP Yass” (in which drag queens offer GPS directions) and the viral “Sara…

BY MARCH 6, Rikers had started to feel dangerous. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is filmed on a soundstage at Chelsea Piers, in Manhattan. There are sets for the courthouse, the interrogation rooms, the district attorney’s office. But what troubled showrunner Warren Leight that Friday was the replica of a Rikers prison cell. It’s a windowless, uncomfortable room—and it doubles as a holding area for the many background actors who populate NBC’s crime drama. “If we’re doing a courtroom scene,” says Leight, “we might have 100 extras in there.” The large cinder block hallway outside the cell seemed problematic as well, because it also functions as the show’s catering area. “Everybody eats the meals together, so they’re on the line, one person after another taking the big spoon and…