Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2021/January 2022 i Vanity Fair

Gen X had Carrie and Big. Gen Z has Emily and Gabriel. Just ask Lucas Bravo, an avowed Sex and the City fan who also leads Emily in Paris as the titular American’s très French love interest. “Of course, it’s more modern because it’s 20 years later,” the 33-year-old Nice native says of Emily, now in its second season—and which, like SATC, was created by Darren Star. “But it was a bit challenging because it could have been easy to be hated.” Fans of the surprise Netflix hit certainly don’t feel that way about Bravo, unless they’ve got something against bilingual chefs with perfect bone structure. Neither do the casting agents scooping him up for a succession of projects that place the actor opposite everyone from Julia Roberts to Borat…

IN MIKE MILLS’S C’mon C’mon, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) is still figuring out how to bond with the young nephew temporarily in his care when the solution presents itself: wrestling. Phoenix and nine-year-old Woody Norman slam themselves into the bed while declaiming like WWF announcers—a sweet scene in a movie that rests on the shoulders of its two leads, and one that never would have happened if it weren’t for Norman. During rehearsals one day, Phoenix had simply asked Norman what he does for fun, and the boy said that he and his brother like wrestling. “Joaquin just started doing that character you see and it really brought everything to life,” says Mills, the film’s writer and director. As directors behind some of this awards season’s most prominent films can attest, having…

ON THE LAST night of Sarah Everard’s life, she picked up a bottle of wine at a London grocery store and visited a friend before beginning her walk home. It was around 9 p.m. on March 3 and the 33-year-old marketing executive was wrapped in warm layers and wearing sensible sneakers. She took a main road, it is believed, that cut through Clapham Common, a park regularly populated by joggers and dog walkers. By 9:30 p.m., she was past the park and on Poynders Road, heading toward her neighborhood. The streets would have been emptier than normal, with pubs and restaurants closed due to the coronavirus lockdown. Sarah’s image was captured briefly on a private doorbell camera as she walked by herself. Then, she vanished. In the following days, the…

AS HEADLINE-GRABBING CATASTROPHES go, it was a delight. A quarter-mile-long ship, decks piled with 18,300 containers full of capitalism’s miscellaneous desiderata, skidded out of control and jammed itself sideways in the Suez Canal. Nothing tragic—no deaths, no injuries—just a fender bender that brought the estimated 15 percent of international trade to a halt. Confusion reigned as hundreds of tankers and freighters hung fire at each end of the canal, wondering what to do next. As content, it felt extremely relatable. By the day it happened, March 23, the world had been under lockdown for a year, and we were all slowly going stir-crazy. The end was in sight—those vaccine doses were finally starting to flow—but we were still stuck. We all felt a bit like that lonely digger, scraping at…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being in a Broadway theater full of people laughing their heads off at one of my shows. What is your greatest fear? A Broadway theater filled with nothing but critics. What do you dislike most about your appearance? Looking older than I really am. I’m only in my 90s! What is your most marked characteristic? A strawberry on my tush and a unique sense of humor. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Benjamin Franklin. He was smart, witty, and had a lot of hair in the back. Which living person do you most admire? Probably me, but I don’t think I’m supposed to say that! What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Being too damned self-absorbed. Which living person…

Lisa ROBINSON “PAIR OF ACES,” P. 114 “Interviewing Alison Krauss and Robert Plant was a full circle moment for me,” says V.F. contributing editor Lisa Robinson, who traveled with Plant on five Led Zeppelin tours. Robinson has interviewed hundreds of musicians; her book, Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls, published in 2020, is out in paperback this month. Sebastian JUNGER “THE END OF FOREVER,” P. 128 Junger—a best-selling author and codirector, with his late friend Tim Hetherington, of the acclaimed war documentary Restrepo—wrote about the U.S.’s calamitous exit from Afghanistan, a country he reported in and on throughout the course of its last 20 years of conflict. Alexis OKEOWO “EYES ON THE PRIZE,” P. 94 Okeowo, who profiled New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, is a veteran journalist and…

AS MANY OF US sat at home, worried about the fate of movies (and, of course, humanity), there was one constant light to turn to for hope: Tom Cruise. The actor and producer was steadfastly committed to getting Mission: Impossible 7 made, even amid the risks and restrictions of the COVID pandemic. Sure, he was caught on audio yelling at crew members—for violating safety protocol—in a manner perhaps too apoplectic. But didn’t that just prove how nobly determined he was to help save the industry and entertain a weary populace? The Mission: Impossible movies are always worth looking forward to, such cunning and elaborately staged action pictures are they. Cruise and the franchise have not tired with age, but rather the opposite; the most recent outing, Fallout, was maybe the…

AT FIRST GLANCE, it appears that Jennifer Lawrence has either been institutionalized or is on the set of a horror movie. She’s sitting in a rattan rocking chair, slowly creaking back and forth. The walls of the otherwise empty room are colorless and bare, except for the discomfiting shadow of a ladder over her right shoulder. Her hair is long and wet. Her computer sits atop a stack of boxes, angled for this September morning’s stint in Zoom prison so that her pregnant belly is out of sight. There’s a scratching at the door behind her. No fool, her cat Frank, otherwise known as Fredericks, doesn’t want any part of this and is trying to get out. Told to blink twice if she needs rescuing, Lawrence laughs. She and her…

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES IS TIRED. Excited and grateful too. But the last two years have sometimes been dark and often exhausting. Her groundbreaking work, the 1619 Project, ignited a fight over who will tell the story of this country and how we think of its identity. But before we could collectively reexamine the legacy of American slavery, then president Donald Trump said the project “warped, distorted, and defiled the American story.” School boards around the nation banned teaching it, likening it to the widely misunderstood legal philosophy known as critical race theory. As the creator and public face of the project, which includes contributions from acclaimed reporters and essayists, Hannah-Jones has received-along with the praise—the brunt of the hate. Her name has become a cultural signifier of the power of investigative…

“LET’S catch the fire AND SEE WHAT WE’VE GOT,” Robert Plant said about why he and Alison Krauss went back into the studio to record their new album, Raise the Roof, the follow-up to 2007’s six-time Grammy-winning album Raising Sand. With their combined talents and diverse tastes, the cliché about the odd coupling of bluegrass princess Krauss and rock god Plant doesn’t apply. Along with their first album and tour, this reunion, recorded prior to the pandemic (with a 2022 tour to follow), is a testimony to their mutual respect for a wide spectrum of music—country, soul, folk, and blues. Their collaboration was, once again, produced by T Bone Burnett, who played guitar, contributed song ideas, and assembled the musicians. Here, in two separate phone calls conducted by Lisa Robinson—Plant…

IN THE FALL OF 2009, city buses rumbled through Rome plastered with close-ups of a windblown Zaha Hadid, promoting the opening of her National Museum of XXI Century Arts. MAXXI, as it is called, was leveraging the architect’s celebrity to advertise her more-baroque-than-Bernini new museum off the ancient Via Flaminia. So when the Iraqi-born Hadid stepped out of her limousine at a balmy museum opening in 2010—in a white off-the-shoulder tubular coat paired with sequin-spangled fingerless gloves and punky black boots—the paparazzi were waiting and ready. It was Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita all over again. The opening—after nearly a decade in the works (Rome wasn’t built in a day)—was a high-wattage moment that cemented Hadid’s celebrity. Like Evita or Liz or Beyoncé, Hadid was now Zaha. Within all…

It was golden hour at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, final resting place of Burt Reynolds, Cecil B. DeMille, and Estelle Getty, just around the corner from Paramount Studios. Five hundred mourners had taken their seats among carefully ordered rows as the sun dipped below the picture-postcard palms. They were dressed almost entirely in white; as followers of the esoteric yoga practice known as kundalini, they believed the color could stretch one’s aura to a very specific nine feet. Behind the stage was projected a black-and-white image of a fair-haired young woman, smiling wistfully. Her name, at least to those gathered, was Guru Jagat, the controversial founder of Ra Ma Institute, a yoga studio dedicated to spreading kundalini to a new generation. But she had other names too. To start with,…

THE TALIBAN DELEGATION to Jalalabad in the summer of 1996 was a dour bunch of old men who took their meals together at a long table in the dining room of the Spinghar hotel. They were there to negotiate the surrender of Jalalabad and I was there to document the last stand of the Afghan government, such as it was, so there were some hard stares across the breakfast buffet. Then we would all go out and face the jet engine heat of the day. A week later I was driving through Kabul when a Taliban gunner opened up on us with a machine gun. (The Taliban already harbored Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida figures in Afghanistan, but the Islamic State was not yet in existence.) My driver cranked…