- Be Smart About the Way You Change: Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice on “Finding Emily” (August 28, 2026)
Bursting with old-school charm even as its provocations are distinctly modern, director Alicia MacDonald’s “Finding Emily” is a witty and sincere reminder of the enduring appeal of romantic comedies. Unlike recent stabs at the genre that feel like they coast on self-awareness and the ability to wink at their audience, MacDonald’s story has a refreshing earnestness. It believes in our primal, primordial need to be seen and loved, but explores how modern life and its many tribulations complicate those desires. Even as it moves through its classic tropes, its inquiry and curiosity never get overshadowed. It’s a gift to be invited to ask questions of and with its characters.
Thankfully, in Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice, MacDonald and writer Rachel Hirons have found more-than-worthy travelers to root us in this voyage. Fearn plays Owen, a sound engineer who, after spending a magical night with Emily (Sadie Soverall), realizes that she has given him the wrong number through which to contact him. Distraught, he seeks help from another Emily (Rice) to find her. Rice’s Emily sees Owen as a prime candidate for her theory that love serves no purpose in the modern world, merely an evolutionary carryover from when people still needed companionship and community.
One key theme that “Finding Emily” thoughtfully explores is the digital anxiety young people face when trying to pursue love. When awkward dates can go viral, texts can be screenshotted and shared out of context, and no one wants to be the cautionary tale, how does this impact the way people interact? Does it force people to be more genuine, or does it make them put up more boundaries? “I think romcoms, in many ways, can be seen as a genre that explores the ways technology impacts human connection,” Rice shared on the theme.
“Finding Emily” was released in the UK in May and as the film gets ready to jump the pond to make its US bow, RogerEbert.com spoke with Rice and Fearn about how filming in Manchester was emblematic of MacDonald’s anachronistic take on the romcom, the joy of filming their key musical scenes, and the outtakes they filmed that ended up being critical to understanding their character’s journeys.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s rare for Manchester to be the setting of a romcom. From the film, it feels like it’s a place that feels modern and ancient, particularly how it oscillates between classic locations like the Northern Quarter and the more contemporary Peak District. That interplay between ancient and modern connects with the ways Alicia has taken rom-com tropes and updated them with distinctly Gen Z angst. Tell me more about what being in that city, and being surrounded by that history, helped clarify what Alicia was trying to accomplish with “Finding Emily.”
Spike Fearn: Manchester was always a place I wanted to film, and I’m happy I could live into that dream. I’m inspired by the purity of Manchester but also its sound. I think with filming for projects, you’re often not there long enough to really fall in love with it, but it was nice to film there, grow with it, and experience its seasons and changes.
I’m just happy that Manchester is shown because a lot of the northern parts of the UK are shown as gray, and that’s not really what it is. How Manchester is shown, with its vibrancy and color, is exactly how it feels. That focus guided how we thought through what Alicia was trying to do with this romcom: expand people’s horizons on what the genre can be.
Angourie Rice: Spike wrote me a poem at the end of filming that was about Manchester. It was specifically about what you’re referencing. It’s about all that is old and new within Manchester, how it holds these realities. You were also writing that poem from the vantage point of where you were filming in your apartment because you see the city, but how it’s surrounded by green.
SF: Manchester feels like it’s a city, but if you’re high enough and you look around, you see mountains and forests all around you. It feels like nature stopped just for Manchester to be there, and then it continued to build around it. That felt weighty, as if Manchester was “chosen” to be there and was there for a reason.
I remember being inspired and reflecting about how nature stopped for this beautiful place that we’re now filming. That sense of time stopping and building around a particular emotion like love was also something I was thinking through.
Spike Fearn stars as Owen and Angourie Rice as Emily in director Alicia MacDonald’s FINDING EMILY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Angourie, I heard you share that the team had about a week to film when school wasn’t in session, and that all of a sudden, these empty streets were flooded with people as production went on. I imagine that puts the idea of “doing things that are cringe with sincerity” to the test when you have all these watchful eyes.
AG: When the students came back, it was as if the city came alive. It was fun because we filmed on Canal Street, and a couple of weeks earlier, Manchester Pride was on that street. It was so crowded, and coming back a couple of weeks later to film was special.
SF: One guy with a camera kept following us around when we were filming. He must have been the only paparazzi guy in Manchester. He always knew where we were.
AG: I didn’t feel embarrassed or cringe while performing. It was interesting, as you pointed out, to think about the fact that people were watching and to work not to let that factor into the performance. We added a shot of me running out of the library at the last minute.
We finished filming early, which never happens, and as I’m running out the front of the library, there’s this crowd of people gathered to watch, evidently, me run–and they set up a barricade. It felt like all the people of Manchester gathered to watch me run from the tram stop in front of the library. They were cheering me on, not knowing what I was running to, from, or for, and I was like, “I’m just filming a movie!” It all felt so magical though; that’s what Manchester is like.
People will see something, and then they’ll be like, “Wait, this is awesome. Let’s check it out.”
Both of you have standout musical moments in this film: Spike, your scene with Jack Riddiford as you rap “Wordy Rappinghood”, and Angourie, your dancing scene with Cora Kirk. Tell me more about filming those scenes of catharsis, particularly how you communicated that sense of liberation in these very contained environments: the car for you, Spike, and the cramped living room for you, Angourie.
SF: For the scene with Jack in the car and me, Alicia was like, “What should the song be?” My
dad always showed me music growing up, and my mom showed me that song by Tom Tom Club. That’s always stuck in my head as the musical influence my mom has had on me, and I thought it would be fitting for these two brothers to listen to something that their mom showed them.
I remember on the day we were doing it, Jack and I realized that we both don’t speak French and there’s obviously a key French part of the song. On the day, Jack said, “Instead of trying to do the French part, what if we just said ‘French French French French French French.’” It was just so enjoyable to film, and we couldn’t hear them say “cut” because we were having such a good time.
The significance of that dance scene, Angourie, was that production played the song out loud while you dance “Off Wiv Ya Headz,” which often doesn’t happen for productions.
AG: Yeah, we filmed that sequence several times. I felt like it was just as fun as the boy’s scene in the car. Alicia and our DP, Rachel Clark, wanted to film the scene as one shot. Obviously they cut into it, but those scenes were filmed through as one take. Alicia also wanted to do a 360-degree perspective of the room so everyone was out of the room–normally very rare on a film set–and it was just Cora, me, Rachel filming us with a handheld camera, and Alicia hiding under the kitchen bench. I love those moments where you get to dance with the camera operator as well.
It felt exactly how it looked; we were coming to the end of filming, so it was emotional to be there, dancing, and letting all of these emotions out. We had an incredible movement coach called Polly Bennett, who gave both Spike and me a framework for how we’d move our bodies. It was less “do this” and more “Here’s roughly how I want you to move. Do something different during this beat; here’s the shape of how you’ll be moving in space.” She gave us guide rails to freestyle. She was also there when you were doing all of the music stuff on stage as well, Spike.
SF: She worked so well with the background actors, which in my scene was important. She did warm-ups with them and helped me feel confident I wouldn’t be embarrassed and could lead that scene with all those people.
Actor Angourie Rice, director Alicia MacDonald and actor Amber Grappy on the set of their film, FINDING EMILY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Matt Squire / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Speaking of filming and endings, a scene that stood out to me was the moment of revelation between your characters, when Owen realizes Emily has been using him. That confession moment is a rom-com staple; these characters have to feel betrayed by each other before they can love each other. What’s interesting, though, is that we don’t hear their confrontation. James Blake’s “Atmosphere” is what the audience hears while the dialogue is inaudible. Talk to me about how that affects your line deliveries as actors, when you know that what you’re saying might not be heard by people, especially for a critical moment like that.
AG: I didn’t know the song, but there was no dialogue scripted. So everything was figured out and improvised on the day.
SF: There was a different song before the James Blake one. It might have been “Love Will Tell Us Apart.” It’s funny you mention that scene because my dad likes that moment too. Everybody picks up on it. It’s such a smart scene, because I remember when we were filming, I really wanted to talk. Thinking about this from Owne’s perspective, I want to say my piece right over what’s happened. We did do a take like that, but then Alicia was like, “That’s a different movie.”
AG: I think it’s good though that we did that take because whether or not it ends up in the film, what we do informs, at least for me, the next take. I was thinking, “What is Emily afraid of? Is she afraid he’s going to yell?” So when you did yell for that take, it was scary because her fears were realized. But then when we did the silent, more muted version, that felt worse than the yelling. What happened is much worse than what she feared. She feels like she deserves to be yelled at, but he doesn’t, and that aches.
SF: Speaking on things that were filmed but didn’t end up in the film yet still informed the character, the last thing we filmed is not actually in the movie. It’s Angourie and Cora walking home from a night out. I had wrapped filming earlier in the day and had gone out with some of the cast to the pub for celebration drinks. I decided to go down to where they were filming, and I had my hood on, and I wanted to get in the back of the shot in a shopping cart.
Scenes like that, whether it makes it in the final film or not, are one of the many ways that sets “Finding Emily” apart from films of a similar ilk. It has such delightful quirks, like that scene where you, Angourie, and the character played by Emily Ash listen to Spike’s heartbeat.
SF: I think that’s what’s so great about the film: there are these quirky small parts where others can shine apart from the main ensemble. It’s what drew me into the story, and because there are so many parts and each person has a funny bit to do, it keeps you engaged. I’m happy you mentioned that heartbeat scene because I love that so much. I couldn’t stop laughing during that moment.
Minnie Driver stars as Dean Whittaker and Prasanna Puwanarajah as Professor Westlake in director Alicia MacDonald’s FINDING EMILY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Angourie, I read that you read Essays in Love by Alain de Botton to prepare for the role, and even attended a Carl Jung lecture. Can you talk about building the philosophical spine for the character of Emily Rain, what stood out to you from these readings, and how you might have layered them into your performance?
I think what I really took from that book is that, and I think Emily goes through this too, is that you can intellectualize love from every single side, and you can figure out how to talk about it and really break it down into its elemental building blocks. At the end of the day, when you’re standing in front of somebody who makes you feel like your heart is going to explode, none of that intellectualizing is going to help. You are still going to feel how you feel and express it in some way. That’s not to say don’t research. You can try to gamify all these things, but there’s something about meeting someone face-to-face and the embodied connection that stands out powerfully.
I’ve been thinking about the role of technology in this film, and how it’s changed what’s possible but made what’s permissible murkier. If “Finding Emily” took place in a different time, I feel like Owen would leave things be, but it’s because he exists in a world where it’s possible to send emails that almost enables his fantasy in a way. Tell me more about this undercurrent of digital anxiety and the ways it manifests in how young people navigate relationships.
AG: I think romcoms, in many ways, can be seen as a genre that explores the ways technology impacts human connection. If you’ve seen “Sleepless in Seattle,” that’s a ‘90s romcom where the character falls in love with somebody over the radio and, using her journalism skills, finds him. So that idea of technology enabling your search manifested there, and I also think about the film “Dangerous Liaisons.” That’s a film based on a book from the 1700s that similarly has this plot of enticement and the use of letter writing to find and locate someone.
I think it’s interesting to think about how, for broncos, the context and details change, but the feelings are the same. For these characters, the feeling of being embarrassed, even if it’s three hundred people who you’ve accidentally sent an email to, or if it’s just that you’ve accidentally said the wrong thing to one person, that feeling of embarrassment stays the same no matter where you are or what time period you’re in.
SF: I think we live in a time where people are scared to see phones in their movies, mainly because people might go to the cinema to get away from life where screens dominate. I empathize with that, but at the same time, this is the time we’re living in. In. I think Alicia, in pursuit of authenticity, cleverly incorporated technology without drawing too much attention to it, focusing on how it has infiltrated every part of our human experience, including love. Love and its pursuits change with the times, but you can still be smart about the way you change.
- “Dark Matter” Reinvents Itself With an Outstanding Second Season (August 28, 2026)
From “Pluribus” to “Silo,” Apple TV has given life to many of the decade’s best sci-fi series. There have also been some middling ones, which is a category that season one of “Dark Matter” fell into. Based on Blake Crouch’s novel of the same name, the series follows quantum physicist Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), who gets sucked into an alternate reality by his doppelgänger, Jason 2, who wants to take over his life. At the end of season one, Jason, his wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), and their son Charlie (Oakes Fegley) finally reunite and find safety in a version of Chicago not too different from their own.
Season two begins with the family living an idyllic life, waking up bathed in sunlight and bickering over fixing their leaky roof. But the safety they’ve found all comes crumbling down seven months after their arrival, when another Jason breaks into the house and attempts to seduce Daniella, just like the first season. But this time, instead of falling for his charm, she shoots and kills him. When a cop shows up and spots the dead body, the Dessens are forced to go on the run again, desperately searching for a world where versions of themselves exist far away.
In its second season, the series takes a step back, and what was once a mind-numbing, reality-hopping sci-fi becomes a thrilling examination of humanity and belonging. Finally, the multiverse isn’t the focus of the story; instead, the characters within these realities are. While season one focused almost entirely on how the Box—the invention that enables travel between dimensions—affected Jason and his family, season two explores how the Box has affected the other people in his life and the world at large. By shedding CGI-laden landscapes and bloated physics jargon, the series has tethered itself back to earth, and therefore, humanity.
By grounding the series, Crouch (who serves as the series’ showrunner and primary writer for season two) forces Jason to take a back seat as Daniela, Ryan (Jimmi Simpson), and Amanda (Alice Braga) get more deserved screen time. Haunted by their old lives, the three are no longer on a mission to return home, but to make sense of their place within the Box’s different dimensions. Any semblance of life as they knew it has crumbled, and with this transformation comes their own unraveling. As the toll of fleeing their old lives begins to fracture each of their resolves, all three actors harness their respective arcs with a magnitude that ripples through the series.
As good as Edgerton is in this series, it’s refreshing that Jason is no longer the sole connector bringing these characters together. By focusing less on him, characters like Blair Caplan (Amanda Brugel) and Leighton Vance (Dayo Okeniyi), who spent season one on the sidelines, are given some of the show’s best material. With Jason now a side character, his peers begin to orbit each other in unexpected ways, and watching different versions of them no longer feels confusing; it’s simply fascinating. As the series leans more into an espionage flair, it becomes the best version of itself, as the multiverse gives way to thrilling car chases, tense moments of file searching, and emotional character arcs.
This isn’t to say the show sheds its sci-fi shell completely; rather, its mystical aspects are woven into the story’s human foundation instead of overtaking it entirely. From the first episode, this season feels less bloated than it did in 2024, putting the spotlight on its fascinating characters instead of the world they operate within. In doing so, the series has two standout episodes that shape up to be some of the year’s best, each focusing on a character (or version of a character) viewers have little to no prior knowledge of. With these episodes, Crouch allows the humanity of this story to not simply take root, but to grow into a foundational aspect of the series going forward.
Scaling back its most excessive parts has made “Dark Matter” one of the best science fiction series of the year. By allowing its characters to sit in their grief, the series makes it clear that the versions of them who existed in their original worlds are gone, and no matter how hard they try, they cannot get those lost pieces of themselves back. Though it often feels like a requiem, the series is ultimately concerned with how we can retain our humanity through the transformations science makes, and, if anything, proves that although the ego of man is unstoppable, so is the fundamental empathy and drive for community found in human nature.
All episodes were screened for review.
- Live Wire: Michael Wright, 1956-2026 (August 28, 2026)
As a journalist, I only had a few brief interactions with the late Michael Wright, mainly at industry functions and movie premieres. But the one I think about most had nothing to do with his filmography, which included “The Principal,” “The Five Heartbeats,” “Sugar Hill,” and HBO’s long-running prison drama Oz. It happened 25 years ago at a party for a friend in a dive on New York’s Lower East Side. At that time, Wright was on Oz playing Omar White, a charismatic, bleakly funny, chronically self-destructive inmate who seemed impervious to reform.
I was there that night with friends who lived in the neighborhood. Wright just happened to be drinking at the bar that night. I recognized him instantly. Anyone who had seen even one of his performances would’ve recognized him instantly. His narrow, chiseled face and deep-set, searching eyes had such richness and depth, it was as if he’d been painted into our reality by one of the Old Dutch Masters (or a painter inspired by them, such as William Orpen).
While visiting the bar to order a round of drinks for our table, I said, as nonchalantly as possible, “I love your performances.”
The conversation that followed was entirely unexpected, and so fascinating that I forgot why I’d walked over there until one of my friends showed up to ask what happened to those drinks,
Our talk continued over the course of the evening and covered a range of subjects, including method acting (he studied with Stella Adler), ‘70s American cinema (his favorite John Cassavetes movie was “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”), and postwar poetry and painting (mainly the Beats and the Abstract Expressionists). He had the energy of a man of culture who enjoyed talking and thinking about art as much as experiencing it. He said the word “art” in such a way that you imagined it capitalized.
The conversation turned to travel. At that point, I had only been outside of the United States twice, both times to Mexico. Suddenly, Wright raised one finger as if to ask for a moment’s silence, which of course he got. His eyes squeezed shut for a moment, and he seemed to get lost in a reverie. Then he opened his eyes, looked at me very seriously, and said, “Bali. You must go to Bali. You must.” He said he went there regularly, almost always by himself, and hoped to go again soon.
“Do you ever think of living there?” I asked.
“All the time,” he said quietly.
The above may seem a strange way to open an appreciation of an actor, but it’s offered in the spirit of the subject. Michael Wright, who died this week at 70, was one of those actors whose commitment to, and absorption by, the characters he played made him stand out, even amid a cast of equally experienced actors. This held true even when he had a much smaller role than his castmates, which was usually the case. Your eye sought him out in frames full of people. He was magnificent.
And he rarely did what you expected him to do, based on the sort of movie he was in. That’s not to say that ignored whatever the point of a scene was and hijacked it, but that he made his own path to the point. Along the way, Wright couldn’t help making you wonder how deep a movie or show could’ve gone, even if it was good already.
He got some attention from his very first film acting job, as the chief of the Del Ray gang in Philip Kaufman’s 1979 film “The Wanderers,” which he won soon after a stint at Stella Adler’ acting academy, where he enrolled after working there as a janitor. Wright was also noticed by the great Robert Altman, who cast him as the needy, troublemaking, homophobic soldier Carlyle in the 1983 Vietnam War drama “Streamers,” which also gave breakout roles to Matthew Modine and David Alan Grier.
But like a lot of moviegoers, I first noticed Wright as Victor Duncan, the bad guy in the 1987 thriller “The Principal,” one of many films from the post-1960s era that endorsed vigilante violence as a solution to urban decay. It stoked white fears of the Black “Other” even as it teamed the white hero with a Black coworker (Louis Gossett, Jr.) who validated his views, and made sure that the gang menacing the school included a scruffy blond white kid who was as vicious as the others.
As Victor, Wright was scary as hell. The movie wouldn’t work if he wasn’t. But I believe Victor’s scariness ultimately had less to do with the characters’ physical actions than the way he played Victor. It was as if the character were in thrall to impulses he did not understand, and that gave him a lot of conflicting feelings all at once, not just a two-dimensional villain’s exhilaration at doing bad things. In the final confrontation, Victor’s energy is so unstable that it’s as if he’s taking orders from demons we can’t see.
Sometimes the performance evoked a malignant version of the tortured teenager Jim Stark, the role James Dean played in “Rebel Without a Cause”—and not just because both actors were visibly too old for their roles. Dean played Jim as an adolescent who felt things so intensely, and with so little guidance on how to manage them, that it seemed to have short-circuited the part of his brain that knew how to interact with other people. Considering Wright’s deep knowledge of cinema, it would be a mistake to assume that he didn’t want us to think about “Rebel.”
That same year brought a performance that hinted at what Wright had the stuff to become: a leading man specializing in characters who were both troubled and troubling, but so compelling that it didn’t matter if you liked them. The film was an international production called “Bed Time Eyes,” about an irresponsible and anti-authoritarian Black U.S. army soldier in Japan and the woman he falls in love with, a nightclub singer who isn’t good enough to make the big time and is sad about it.
“Bed Time Eyes” follows in the footsteps of the 1959 classic “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” about a French Jewish woman and a Japanese man whose intense sexual relationship is partly about exorcising the trauma of surviving genocide (she survived Nazi-occupied Germany, while he lost loved ones to the U.S. nuclear attacks), it’s about the thrill of ignoring racial taboos when it comes to love and sex, and the social punishments levied as a result.
The author of the source novel, Amy Yamada, became fascinated by Black American culture as a middle schooler after encountering soul music, steeped herself in fiction by Black writers and went on a literary career that often focused on this specific type of culture clash. The movie barely got a release in the United States and is, as far as I can tell, impossible to stream legally (although VHS and DVD copies can be bought from dealers).
That’s a shame, because the movie lets you see Wright playing a man who is brought low by unchecked appetites and self-annihilating choices (he both uses and deals drugs), and can be a hateful or mindlessly cruel person, but is also a magnetic, brooding bad-boy type of character—the kind of man women warn each other to avoid, even as they swoon over him. Wright gets to wear a tuxedo in this one. He looks like he could step into “For the Mood for Love” and tango.
Speaking of gorgeous clothes: “Sugar Hill,” a 1994 drug drama scripted by “New Jack City” writer and Village Voice contributor Barry Michael Cooper, and directed by Cuban filmmaker Leon Ichaso (“Crossover Dreams,” “Pinero”), is one of the best dressed movies of the ‘90s, as well as one of the best lit, photographed, and scored (by Terence Blanchard, Spike Lee’s regular composer). Despite an aggressive PR build-up focusing on star Wesley Snipes, who was on a hot streak from “Jungle Fever,” “New Jack City,” “Passenger 57,” “White Men Can/t Jump,” the film passed through theaters quickly, and not without reason: Snipes’ character, Romello Skuggs, is a morose drug dealer employed by the Italian mobsters who still rule Harlem; the love story between Romello and his schoolteacher girlfriend Melissa (Theresa Randle) is bland and thin, and the whole thing is suffused in fog of despair that was off-putting to viewers who went in expecting the kinetic intrigue of “New Jack City.”
But it’s worth seeing because the main story is affecting enough to overcome all manner of missteps. The relationship between Romello and his older brother Raynathan (Wright) isone half Charlie and Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets” (Romello is the guilty, tormented one, Raynathan the live wire who’ll zap anybody); and the other half is Michael and Fredo Corleone in the “Godfather” movies (Raynathan resents that his younger brother was always the one who excelled in school and was trusted with important jobs and family obligations).
But the family they’re part of seems cursed, literally, as if in a horror movie. When the boys were young, their mom died from an overdose of heroin, a drug brought into their lives by their father A.J. (Clarence Williams III), who dealt drugs for the Italians and became hooked himself. Between A.J. ‘s parental impotence after years of heroin use and lingering damage from being shot by his employers as punishment for incompetence, it’s up to Romello to become the head of the family, even though he’s a prep school kid who won a scholarship to Georgetown that he won’t end up taking because he feels responsible for his brother, his father, and the neighborhood. When the story begins, he already wants out, and of course Raynathan wants him to stay in.
It’s not until you get to the very end of “Sugar Hill” that you realize the story of the Skuggs family and the criminals they interacted with is as much a Shakespeare-styled family tragedy with elements from ghost stories and horror movies (it’s clear that Romello has PTSD from his childhood, and the scenes materialize in his mind like accusing spirits) as it is a Black gangsta flick in an era that produced many great ones. “Other films have adapted and explored these themes with a bit more nuance,” wrote Sean “S.A.” Cosby in an essay published at the crime fiction blog Do Some Damage, “but none of them had Wesley Snipes sporting a full length leather coat by Versace over a suit by Armani.”
Raynathan is arguably Wright’s finest performance, and certainly the one that did the best job of containing and channeling the intense but digressive energy that his racing mind brought to every character he played. It’s one of those performances that goes up to the edge of Too Much and sometimes tumbles into the abyss, but that you accept because the actor has made the character’s flamboyant eruptions of self-pity, misdirected anger, and spotlight-hijacking melodrama seem integral to who this man is, and inevitable considering all that he’s been through.
The final act is driven by Raynathan, who takes it upon himself to fix problems he believes Romello is too distracted by new love and old miseries to deal with on his own. The results are as horrible as you’d expect, given that Raynathan is nowhere near as smart as he needs to be to step into Romello’s Gucci loafers. The climactic face-off between the brothers is agonizingly real, and Snipes, who tends to play cool customers, is more unguardedly emotional than he’s ever been onscreen, before or since. Perhaps the sheer force of Wright’s performance shook Snipes out of any self-protective habits he might have developed after becoming a movie star.
Wright stayed hungry as an actor even though the pickings were always slim for a performer like himself. He was striking, in the way that certain mid-century jazz musicians were (what a Miles Davis he could’ve played, had the material been available to him)., He wasn’t radiantly beautiful like the young Snipes, or Denzel Washington, or earlier icons like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte. He was slender, dark-skinned, and raspy-voiced. He had a latent incendiary quality, reminiscent of actors like Gary Oldman and Christopher Walken, who played weirdos, villains, and creeps a lot, but were still given lead roles in smaller movies because, let’s go ahead and say it, they were white.
There was a brief moment right after the release of Robert Townsend’ s 1960s soul music biopic when it seemed as if Wright might have a shot at the kind of stardom that transcended racial constraints. His character, lead vocalist Eddie King, Jr., was an electrifying mess of an alpha male, gifted by God with a voice that could uplift the spirit and speak to the heart, but eventually brought low by substance abuse and his own arrogance. Even in a cast stacked with great actors, he stood out.
But it didn’t happen. And it would be foolish to say it was only because both Hollywood and society at large weren’t willing to extend Wright the opportunities given to the likes of Oldman, Walken, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, and other actors who brought an acting student’s eagerness to experiment even to parts that didn’t require it.
There were rumors that Wright was difficult, in the sense that he wanted to explore every conceivable aspect of a character with directors even when the priority was staying on schedule; but also in the sense of being hard to keep track of during a production. His lifelong battles with alcohol and drugs were an open secret. He acknowledged them himself after a 2012 arrest in New York City for driving under the influence, which led to him entering recovery and reportedly staying sober after that.
“The greatest sin an actor can commit is to fail to be interesting,” he once told an interviewer. “I always try to make my characters interesting. I want you to be riveted and wonder what’s going on behind my eyes. I want the audience to think along with me and go on an internal journey.”
He achieved all that and more, remarkably so when you think about what he was personally up against. He seemed to want to expand our horizons, not just his.
I still haven’t been to Bali. I hope to go someday. When I see my first sunset there, I’ll think of Michael Wright.
- “Adults” Grows Up Just Enough to Become One of TV’s Best Sitcoms in Season 2 (August 27, 2026)
“I’m unemployed. I’m not cool. If I’m not young anymore, then what am I even?”
There is no shortage of stellar writing on this season of FX’s “Adults,” and much of it is hilarious—so much so that at one point I laughed so hard I choked and began coughing—but this line, and the scene it’s in, bares the show’s heart. One lead character says it to another, the moment bookended by gut-busting physical comedy, but the growth, existential dread, and laughs do not come at each other’s expense. The first season, though funny in its own right, received criticism for being a bit too wacky for its own good. (Our own Brian Tallerico hit the nail on the head by describing the show tending to veer off course when it felt like the writers were “using a TikTok FYP for punchlines.”)
This season is a different matter. Yes, Paul Baker (Jake Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), Anton (Owen Thiele), and Billie (Lucy Freyer) are all still residing rent-free at Samir’s (Malik Elassal) absent parents’ home in Queens. Paul Baker (always referred to by his full name, a great running gag) is married to Anton for visa purposes, and the two are keeping their very real attraction to one another hidden from Issa (and, to some degree, from themselves), who is still dating Paul Baker. Billie is still reeling from losing both her career path in journalism and an (admittedly gross) budding relationship with her high school journalism teacher, while Anton reckons with various aspects of his personality, including how he relates to his family, strangers, and coworkers. Samir tries to get a job, with comedically disastrous results; his relationship trajectory is a surprisingly moving arc in the season’s back half.
FX’s Adults — Ep. 201 — Pictured: (l-r) Owen Thiele as Anton, Lucy Freyer as Billie, Jack Innanen as Paul Baker, Amita Rao as Issa. CR: Michael Gibson/FX
Sure, we don’t spend too much time at our main crew’s workplaces, and yes, they are mostly still un- or underemployed, but this is, first and foremost, a hangout sitcom. It does not need to dwell in any kind of realism to make the audience laugh. “Adults” has now crafted a narrative where laughter and poignancy dovetail naturally. Most importantly, it feels as though the writers now have a better idea where they want these characters to go.
With that in mind, “Adults” creators Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold, who hail from “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” have done well to staff their writers’ room with writers from a variety of backgrounds. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi contributes a terrific episode this season; Ananya Hegde’s episode titled “Fake ID” might be one of the best of the season.
The first episode, written by Shaw and Kronengold, starts off rather tongue-in-cheek, then builds to an unstoppable crescendo with wall-to-wall jokes that not only develop the characters, but plant seeds for jokes that pay off in the season’s final episode. Consistent attention is paid to wordplay: a riotous episode-long metaphor for masturbation, a debate about emphasis on sentence structure à la “Love, Actually,” the nuances of code-switching with different friend groups. It’s multipurpose humor; it makes you laugh, but also tells you something about these characters. They may love their friends, and have different flavors of codependent relationships with one another, but there are things they fear too, and long for, and are afraid to reveal.
FX’s Adults — Ep. 205 — Pictured: (l-r) Amita Rao as Issa, Malik Elassal as Samir, Lucy Freyer as Billie, Jack Innanen as Paul Baker. CR: Michael Gibson/FX
The real secret sauce here is the cast. There is nary a weak link in the main quintet: Elassal brings a wholesome sincerity to Samir that can be both goofy and heartbreaking, while Innanen is a wild card, exploring new aspects of Paul Baker’s identity with aplomb. Freyer’s turn is equal parts moving and comic: she perfectly balances the feeling of knowing some things and not knowing many more, all while mourning the life she thought she’d have by now.
But this show truly belongs to two people whose real-life friendship clearly informs their onscreen dynamic: Thiele and Rao, whose dynamic is full of sheer magnetism. The former makes it look so easy, sliding from shame and anxiety to a knowing smirk in nanoseconds, rocking Anton’s supermodel wardrobe like no one’s business. Few people are born stars, and Thiele is one of them. And Rao might just be the single most expressive actor on television right now. Issa has no poker face, and “Adults” is better off for it; her eyes widen and swivel, her glee broadens her face, disappointment compresses it, and she shows off some accent work this season that I pray becomes a recurring bit. She has plenty of growing up to do, but the ferocity of her feelings—her love for her friends, her loyalty, her refusal to veer from her plans, no matter how mercurial—is the glue that holds these idiots together.
Sitcoms are seemingly in a current transition period: “Not Suitable for Work” has been canceled after one very bad season (frankly, they ought to swap names with “Adults”), “Hacks” has ended, while “Abbott Elementary” and “It’s Always Sunny” are practically O.G.s at this point. I am cautiously optimistic that “Adults” could be a new hope in the void. It’s the rare show that satirizes Gen Z while gently reminding you, dear Millennial or Gen-X viewer, that you likely weren’t so different, either.
Entire season screened for review.
- Don’t Dream It, Be It: Tim Curry (1946-2026) (August 27, 2026)
It’s hard to imagine a more impactful presence in the millennial mind, particularly the outsider, queer, or cinephile, than that of Tim Curry, the veteran actor of stage and screen who passed this Wednesday at the age of 80. Tony Award nominee, voice actor extraordinaire, honorary Muppet—all of these descriptors fit Curry’s decades of work, a body of acting best characterized by his resonant purr of a voice, deep, piercing eyes, and a flamboyance from which it was impossible to look away.
Curry was born in 1946 in Cheshire, the son of a school secretary and a Royal Navy Captain; the latter’s revolving door of assignments sent him everywhere from Hong Kong to a variety of British seaside towns before they settled down in Plymouth. It was mere weeks after that that Curry’s father suffered a stroke and later died from pneumonia complications in 1958. Curry was 11.
He literally burst onto the scene in fishnets, high heels, and thickly-lacquered lipstick as the libidinous mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 1975’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a role he originated on the London stage. (He met the show’s playwright, and his co-star as Riff Raff, Richard O’Brien, when they did Hair in London.) A “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania,” Curry’s Frank proudly flaunted all pretenses of good taste, and in the case of poor Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, the pearl-clutching norms of heteronormativity.
Roger Ebert said of Curry’s performance, “He’s the best thing in the movie, maybe because he seems to be having the most fun.” He vamped, strutted, and sneered his way through that picture, urging his fellow freaks and queerdos to “don’t dream it, be it.” Like Terence Stamp in “Teorema,” he seduced virtually every other character in the picture, and it was as liberating as it was chaotic. And Curry, with every high kick and bugged-out eye, embodied the queer freedom that a generation of young queer folks would cling to. (I had the CD of the film’s soundtrack in my car as a teen; little did I realize why those notes would stick with me so much.)
It was the kind of role that could ruin or pigeonhole a young actor like Curry and, well, despite a modest reception upon release, “Rocky Horror” would quickly become a midnight movie favorite, one that’s still screened in movie theaters to enthusiastic crowds (and audience participation) to this day. From there, he’d bounce into Hollywood with a variety of snarling villain roles perfectly suited to his particular brand of bombast: Rooster in 1982’s “Annie” (that mustache), the Satan-like Darkness in Ridley Scott’s gauzy 1985 fantasy “Legend” (those horns), a duplicitous preacher in 1988’s underseen “Pass the Ammo.”
On “Legend,” Roger Ebert would say of Curry that he “makes an effective Darkness; I liked his style. But, once again, the makeup people have done such a good job with his blazing eyes and gigantic horns that, in a way, almost any actor could be lurking inside there (only Curry’s sensuous lips give him away).”
But his next iconic role would be as the breathlessly expositing butler Wadsworth in 1985’s “Clue,” in which he chewed through scenery as if it were a steaming bowl of shark’s fin soup. “Clue” is murder mystery farce at its finest, and alongside his talented co-stars (including Eileen Brennan, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd) he met every gag, line, and frenzied dash from room to room with the same brio and clipped upper-crust accent we’d come to expect. Even when he went small, it felt big; when he arched his eyebrow, the ceiling always rose a couple inches.
Same goes for Pennywise in 1990’s “IT,” playing the demonic clown from Stephen King’s imagination with equal playfulness and menace. His villainy was always a bit impish, no matter the role; sure, he was a baddie, but he loved it, and that’s what made him so magnetic to watch. It’s what made him so cuddly even when he transgressed in such unscrupulous ways—it’s funny, considering the gender-bending hedonism of his breakout role, that he’d find himself snarling giddily through so many family films, from “Home Alone 2” to Long John Silver in “Muppet Treasure Island.” (As the cape-wearing Grand Wizard in the 1986 TV movie “The Worst Witch,” he threatened us with such Halloween horrors as a dog turning into a cat.) With every oily, smarmy retort, Curry let his characters relish in the delight of villainy, and we enjoyed every second of it.
In addition to his live-action roles, his reedy, musical voice made him perfect for voice acting. Here, too, he chiefly played villains in everything from “FernGully” to the Power Rangers knockoff “Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad”—no role was beneath him. (He did, of course, play the occasional virtuous character, as his long run as patriarch Nigel on Nickelodeon’s “The Wild Thornberries proves.) He’d even dabble in computer games, most famously as the Russian Premier Cherdenko in “Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3” (dusting off his Russian accent from the John McTiernan Cold War thriller “The Hunt for Red October”). In perhaps the hammiest line Curry would ever deliver, he asserted that he would flee to “the one place not corrupted by capitalism…. SPACE!”
But his first love was always the stage, and he’d return to it several times throughout his career. His first Tony nomination was as Mozart beside Ian McKellan’s Salieri in a production of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”; in 1992, he earned another for “My Favorite Year” on Broadway. He originated the role of King Arthur in “Spamalot,” which snagged him his third nom in 2005.
Curry would work steadily in film, TV, theater, and a variety of other mediums until 2012, after a sudden stroke during a massage gave him mobility issues on his left side. He would use a wheelchair until his passing. Even so, Curry greeted his new condition with his signature humor, and went on to refer to his disabled left hand as “Teddy.” He still did the occasional voice work, including taking a stint as Emperor Palpatine in “The Clone Wars.” But his 2025 memoir “Vagabond” sums up Curry’s life as only he can tell it: ribald, witty, deliciously dry, and filled with absolute pleasure.
In a late-in-life interview with Ben Mankiewicz for CBS Sunday Morning, Curry said of his impending passing, “I don’t fear death. I try to avoid it [laughs] as I think we all do. But I suspect that in the end, I will welcome it… I think it may be comforting to go bye-bye, and I want to earn the privilege of not being here. I’m not galloping towards it, but I think I may well embrace it.” Wherever he may be, I hope he sees blue skies through the tears in his eyes.
