Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i Vanity Fair

The new essentials are all about low-key polish—and with the Sex and the City reboot now in motion, these three are fit for onscreen cameos. (Yes, a scrunchie even Carrie could wear.) DO-EVERYTHING LIP Whatever the agenda—lunch meeting or makeout—the hybrid Ultralip formula is a go. Seed oils (watermelon, meadowfoam) and hyaluronic acid give a plush balm texture; the nine tints wear like an understated, grown-up gloss. $18. (glossier.com) ALL-PURPOSE TRIMMER With the past year remapping relationships to body hair, Fur’s trimmer is a well-timed addition: all-gender, all-terrain. Cordless and water-resistant, it offiers four lengths. Neoclassical grooves lend grip, and an LED at the tip lights the way. $89. (furyou.com) ELEVATED CLASSIC The fanciful scrunchies on Celine’s spring 2021 runway are for a new generation. “It’s not a full carbon…

SHORTLY BEFORE THE end of the TV run of my beloved Sex and the City, I was discussing the show with a friend of my mother’s, a smug yuppie then obsessed with getting her son into Harvard. We didn’t like each other much, but we both hated the suburbs we lived in, sharing an interest in the world beyond malls, megachurches, and SUVs. I told her I was sad the series was ending. She said, “Well, they had to end it. You know the reason why.” The year was 2004. I was a teenager who fully expected to become a darker-skinned version of Carrie Bradshaw. I actually didn’t know the reason why. With the odd air of triumph that comes from crushing someone else’s fantasy, she explained, “They’re too old.”…

THE DOORBELL RANG at 135 Rue Esseghem, A MODEST ROW HOUSE in Jette, a Brussels suburb. The concierge was occupied with a pair of Japanese tourists visiting the apartment, which had been home to the surrealist painter René Magritte and his wife, Georgette Berger, from 1930 until 1954, and was now a private museum. It was shortly after 10 a.m. on September 24, 2009. When she excused herself to answer the door, the concierge found two young men waiting at the threshold. One of them asked if visiting hours had begun; the other placed a pistol against her head and forced his way inside. The armed men quickly rounded up both tourists and the three staff members on duty, leaving them kneeling in the museum’s small courtyard, where Magritte had…

THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT Netflix Much of Beth Harmon’s arc happens internally: her struggles after being orphaned, her plight as a female chess prodigy, her battle with addiction. Designer Gabriele Binder used color strategically to telegraph those struggles—green, for instance, to mark when Anya Taylor-Joy’s character lost her mother, then again when she seemed to heal. “When she gets to Moscow and the final game, we came back to this green color to show that she is reconnected again,” she says. Binder modeled other looks after different 1950s and ‘60s icons. “Her early idols are Audrey Hepburn and Jean Seberg,” says the designer. “After [Beth’s] mother dies, she finds more youth culture and goes to New York to connect more with Andy Warhol’s Factory style.” For the show’s final scenes, Binder…

PARTWAY INTO THE second episode of I May Destroy You, Arabella (played by writer and codirector Michaela Coel) acquiesces to a nap. She’s sorting through shards of memory—what she will later realize was a drug-facilitated sexual assault in a London bar—but for now, her friend Terry (Weruche Opia) is tucking her into bed. “Where’s your headscarf?” Terry asks, fishing in the nightstand drawer for it. It’s an everyday gesture made visible—an example of how I May Destroy You speaks volumes in subtle details. As the show’s makeup and hair designer Bethany Swan explains, “If you’ve spent the time to glue your wig down and do your edges, your best friend is not going to let you go to sleep and mess it up and put your hard work to waste.”…

Saved by the Bell PEACOCK Josie Totah “felt so empowered” playing Lexi Haddad-DeFabrizio, a quintessential queen bee “who happens to be trans,” on Peacock’s Saved by the Bell reboot. “I found myself leaving set with a greater sense of confidence each day of filming,” she says. Totah, who came out as trans in 2018, is both a performer and a producer on the series, affording her more agency to tell “authentic” stories about young people that “were not only entertaining, but felt real and palpable.” She considers the original Saved by the Bell stars who appear in the reboot to be “aunts and uncles” who welcomed a new generation with open arms. Totah enjoys bingeing Spanish soap operas, longs to be in a crowd so big that it gives her…

Lovecraft Country HBO The Lovecraft Country star loved what she wore as Letitia Lewis in the HBO drama series. “I wish I could’ve stolen the green party dress that Leti smashes the cars in,” she says. She did make off with a pair of cream capri pants from episode eight—“the one pair that didn’t get ruined with Shoggoth blood!” This pandemic year has been transformative: “I’ve gone through quite an intense season of transition and awakening,” she says. “It’s required me to extend a level of compassion to myself that I usually reserve for others.” It’s also given her some extra time to practice Carole King’s “So Far Away” on the guitar—“playing it over and over because I couldn’t master this one chord.”…

It was two days after the polls had closed. Donald Trump was still raging about the early results, Joe Biden was daydreaming about his Oval Office decor, and millions of Americans were fixated on the cable news channels. Steve Kornacki, a bespectacled election wonk and one of the main faces of MSNBC’s “Road to 270” coverage, was gesticulating in front of an interactive touchscreen—the Big Board in MSNBC jargon, not to be confused with CNN’s Magic Wall—breaking down the nail-biter in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, over on the West Coast, Leslie Jones was snacking on something that sounded delicious (if her enthusiastic chomps were any indication), her eyes glued to the TV. “This is how I like my reporters to look: disheveled and concerned,” the former Saturday Night Live star said between…

THIRTEEN LONG YEARS ago, I cut my teeth as a blogger by recapping Gossip Girl, the CW’s soapy series about mean teens on the decidedly un-mean streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I’d read some of the books, by Cecily von Ziegesar, prior to the series’s release, and while I did enjoy Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz’s TV version enough to devote hours of my life to recapping it, I was forever disappointed that it didn’t have as much bite as the novels. Where were the drugs and the sex, so dishily strewn across the pages? The show had to be more tame, because it was on network television and ostensibly aimed at teenagers. But there might have been some creative ways to make the series more lurid—oftentimes,…

At 12:11 p.m. on January 5, an eight-seat Bombardier Challenger 300 jet took off from Memphis International Airport. A little over an hour and a half and one time zone later, it touched down at Dulles, just outside of Washington, D.C. The following day a seditious horde of Donald Trump supporters, unapologetically encouraged by him, mounted an insurrection to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. “After this we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” the 45th president told attendees of the “Stop the Steal” rally gathered at the Ellipse, a park a little over one mile from Capitol Hill. At 2:11 p.m., the first of the mob had breached the Capitol on the west side of the building, near the Senate chamber. At…

GRACE AND FRANKIE Netflix Age was nothing but a number for Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, the dynamic duo at the center of Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris’s comedy—and the obvious winners of the “TV casts we’d most like to share a bottle of wine with” award. POSE FX The category is: uncategorizable. FX’s period drama broke barriers with style, enlisting a remarkably diverse creative team and a record-setting number of trans cast members to dramatize New York’s ballroom scene in the era of Reagan (and Bush the First). YOUNGER Paramount+ The immortal Sutton Foster anchored Darren Star’s winningly high-concept sitcom about a 40-something divorcée who disguises herself as a millennial to get a job in book publishing. Our only complaint is that the show didn’t find more excuses…

It’s a Sin HBO MAX “I instantly related to Ritchie,” says Olly Alexander of the spirited character he plays in the HBO Max original limited series It’s a Sin. Ritchie also happens to be an actor; “I had the same big dreams as him.” Alexander, who is best known as the front man of the synth-pop band Years & Years, says his music and acting careers are often interconnected. “I’d never been the lead of a TV show with such a demanding role,” he says. “I honestly never thought I would be able to handle it.” But playing sold-out arenas changed his perspective. “When I’m onstage, it’s me, but I’m also playing a character—that gave me the confidence to go for it.” While Alexander would love another leading role, he…

The Undoing HBO “I called his inner monster John Boy,” says Hugh Grant, referring to Jonathan Fraser, the suave and criminal pediatric oncologist he played on HBO’s psychological thriller The Undoing. The Golden Globe winner has had a blast employing his massive charm to dastardly ends in his recent projects: “It’s really been about six baddies in a row now. I must stop. But good people revolt me slightly.” When not channeling his inner bad boy, Grant likes to unwind with a Lagavulin whisky and imagine a somewhat happier end for John Boy. “I always thought Jonathan went to prison, where he developed an unexpected enthusiasm for musical theater under the influence of his cellmate, Phoenix Buchanan”—i.e., the antagonist Grant played in 2017’s Paddington 2. “Together they stage a production…

EARLY ON TUESDAY, August 4, 1987, writer and producer Yvette Lee Bowser pulled out her diary and started an entry: It’s 2:52 a.m. Today, I begin my first real job as an intern writer with a new NBC sitcom. I’m so excited I can’t sleep. Right now, I’m organizing myself for my big day. I can hardly believe that it’s really happening. I’m going to make something happen with this opportunity, I really am. God knows my heart and how determined I am to make change in this world. Not only in my life, but for others. Bowser shares this over Zoom from her home office in Los Angeles as one of more than a dozen cast and crew talking about their days on A Different World. The seminal Cosby…

In 2011, George R. R. Martin told the New York Times that he published Game of Thrones after a decade of Hollywood turning down his drafts due to their length and projected expense. “The irony of all this is that the project I thought most unlikely to ever be filmed,” he said, “is now going to be this big show on HBO.” There were book-to-TV adaptations long before the dawn of Westeros (from The Forsyte Saga to Friday Night Lights), but the rise of streaming (and an insatiable thirst for market-tested I.P.) has produced a bumper crop of recent hits based on best sellers: Big Little Lies, Normal People, A Handmaid’s Tale. This year has already heralded adaptation announcements for Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble and Laura Lippman’s Lady…

LAST FALL, as networks talked about reviving, reuniting, or otherwise reanimating their most famous shows, a rallying cry that was at least three quarters serious could be heard all over the internet. As New York Times critic Margaret Lyons tweeted once: “Reboot ‘Party Down.’ Then we can talk.” The show inspires rabble-rousing, to put it mildly. Party Down—a patheti-comic half-hour gem and one of Starz’s first original series—followed a catering company in Los Angeles staffed by Hollywood aspirants and adjacents fueled by delusion, self-loathing, or a piquant combination of the two as they struggled toward the day they wouldn’t need those shitty jobs anymore. The show captured what it is to fail at your lifelong dream, tapping into what showrunner John Enbom calls the “slightly uneasy feeling” of being stuck…

ISSA RAE DOESN’T MAKE VISION boards anymore, but let’s take a look at her last one and see how she did. She assembled it from magazine photos, headlines, and other odds and ends at the behest of her publicist back in 2013, when she was between projects. It’s now framed on a wall in her make-shift home office in Los Angeles. Among other things, Rae, who was born Jo-Issa Rae Diop, wanted to cook healthier meals. To fall in love. To have a house with a pool. The board, I can’t help but notice when she Zooms me around the room, also has an HBO logo on it and the words “TV Writer.” You could say the thing worked. Rae has indeed fallen in love—she has an enormous diamond engagement…

SOME MIGHT CALL Ted Lasso naive, but look, that kind of talk is not appreciated around here. Of all the shows that hit big this year, the Apple TV+ comedy about the unflappable soccer coach brought the greatest and giddiest blast of optimism to an overwhelmingly grim year. As Ted, Jason Sudeikis was the friend that many of us needed. He became a word-of-mouth sensation because we just had to share. “We certainly couldn’t have predicted the dumpster fire that the year was going to be,” says showrunner Bill Lawrence (Scrubs) who cocreated Ted Lasso with Sudeikis. “The whole writing staff talked about how the world, specifically social media and politics, had gotten to such a cynical, dark place that it was just pervasively gross. If I was to meet…

WHEN THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT premiered on HBO Max in November, a world locked down by the coronavirus pandemic was offered a chance to escape—both into the show’s twisty mystery and the far-flung cities where Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie tries to figure out how her one-night stand in Bangkok ended in murder. The Thai capital recurs throughout the show as Cassie returns in her mind to the hotel suite where her fling Alex (Michiel Huisman) met his end. The room, built on a soundstage in New York City, shape-shifts in a wide range of fantasy sequences, with design elements heavily inspired by real Thai interiors. The rest of the time, however, Bangkok plays itself. “We felt like it was important to transport the audience and transport Cassie into places that truly could…

GILLIAN ANDERSON RELIES on a simple litmus test when she’s considering a new role: She asks herself whether a part of the character lives inside of her already. “I learned in my career to trust that,” she says on the phone from London. “If I didn’t feel that, I was in trouble saying yes. If I did feel that, between the support that I was going to get and a lot of hard work, I’d be able to get there.” Anderson has gone remarkable places, playing characters far-flung in time, location, and temperament. Beyond lighting up adaptations of novels by Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, and Wharton, the feminist actor, activist, and author has most recently played a sex therapist on the comic drama Sex Education and riveted us on The Crown…

OMAR SY DEVOURED America’s brightest, gaudiest television as a young boy growing up in France. “I learned a lot from TV shows from the ’80s, you know?” says the Lupin star, calling from his Paris apartment after a long day of shooting his Netflix series. “I don’t know the title in English, but do you remember Super Jim my?” Honestly, no, it doesn’t ring a bell. But soon it becomes clear that what Sy is actually saying is Super Jaimie, which… also doesn’t ring a bell. “She had super powers,” he says. “It wasn’t Wonder Woman, but she was a superwoman. And her ex-husband was l’homme qui valait trois milliards, a robot guy who was a superman.” Okay, yes! He means The Bionic Woman, about Jaime Sommers, which was indeed…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Waking up in the morning is as perfect as anything gets. What is your greatest fear? The greatest fear I can remember is coming back from WW II and being amazed that I was more afraid to audition for a job than I was flying 52 missions. On what occasion do you lie? Every time I relay my weight. What do you dislike most about your appearance? The part that makes me look my age. Which living person do you most despise? The person who most admires Donald Trump. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? The rare moment I don’t believe in myself enough. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Dishonesty and insincerity. What is your greatest…