Month: November 2020

Travis Scott really captured the mood of the nation when he tweeted last night, “I can’t be the only one waiting for the last episode of the undoing.” Indeed, he is not—the group chats were lit up all day in anticipation of the big reveal: Who killed Elena Alves?

Tonight’s The Undoing finale will clear up any lingering questions about the murder, director and executive producer Susanne Bier promises, including whether Grace (Nicole Kidman), Jonathan (Hugh Grant), and even Henry Fraser (Noah Jupe) were involved in it. And though she’s not dropping any more hints, the famed director of After the Wedding, The Night Manager, and Bird Box shared some insight into her directing process, how to juggle multiple murder suspects onscreen, and why, exactly, everyone is so obsessed with Nicole Kidman’s green coat. Below, she answers all our burning questions about the most talked-about show of the season.

Your work often delves into the moment a person’s semblance of normalcy is uprooted and rearranged. What was the draw of The Undoing, both within and outside of that framework?

When HBO approached me and said that they were doing a project that David Kelly was writing for Nicole, that was a huge draw. And then the notion, as you mentioned, is another big draw because it’s very oddly recognizable—not in that dramatic sense that it is within the script, but in a sense of being thrown into something where you think you know and understand the role, and then the role has a completely different shape from what you anticipated.

How do you craft that tension, getting to the point that everyone is just a second or two away from melting down?

It’s very much about making sure that the tension is there. How can I compare it? If you have somebody who is drunk and who gets home, then this drunk person is going to do everything they can in order to hide that they are drunk. It’s a little bit like that. You want to fight it and because you fight it, it’s much more palpable and oddly more visible, even if the person fighting it thinks it’s much more hidden.

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The big cliffhanger at the end of episode 5 is quite the blindside. It’s very quiet and feels routine, but then you get this big reveal. How did you approach shooting that?

At this point, because it’s episode 5, we’ve gotten used to, Oh, there’s going to be a cliffhanger. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to go, Oh, okay. Maybe the cliffhanger was the call with the mother. I wanted the audience to be a little bit relaxed, then throw it in at the very end.

So, what can we expect from the finale?

All I can say is that you will get to know how it ends. We’re not cheating you. You will know what happened.

Let’s talk about building out Grace’s world—are you sick of talking about the green coat yet?

[Laughs] No, I’m not. It’s interesting because I had told the costume designer, Signe Sejlund, that we needed a very distinct coat for Nicole. And right away when I started reading, I was like, “She needs to have that big red hair.” I kept bugging the costume designer about that coat because I felt that, until we had that coat, we didn’t know who she was. It was a key to her character. She doesn’t look at all like the other moms in school. She doesn’t dress conventionally upper class at all. She dresses a bit bohemian, but there’s still a sense of… Nobody is thinking it’s a throwaway coat. It looks classy, but it’s not recognizable as a certain designer. That added to her being very unlike everyone else, which was really important.

How did you ensure Elena’s presence felt ghostly, like a haunting? You can’t get away from her face. Why did you decide to make her such a visual presence on the show?

She grew a lot on us because she’s so enigmatic and interesting. It seemed a bit interesting to have a ghost, but also, she’s a bit like Brigitte Bardot. She has a sultry, old-school beauty, which is so different from that whole New York environment, which is much more controlled and athletic, in a way. She’s got that very deep sense of longing. And it was also a reminder of something we possibly all carry but we try not to deal with.

How did you go about creating the visual language for the “flashback” moments Grace is imagining? Jonathan sleeping with Elena, the moment Elena is killed… Were they part of the script originally?

There was an element of flashback in the script. I can’t remember which ones were in the script and which ones were done later. When you’re shooting, you go, Oh, it would be interesting to have this. And then you take a note of it. But it was very much playing with that balance of, what do we know? What do we not know? What do we imagine? What is real? What is not real? And then making sure the audience has that weird sense as well—of not being quite sure of what to trust and what not to trust, exactly like what Grace has. Or actually, what a number of the characters have.

Because you’re juggling so many threads in this story, anybody could be the murderer. How do you ensure each suspect gets the right amount of screen time without saying too much?

I mean, I have a brilliant screenwriter who tailors it very elegantly. But when you’re shooting it and editing it, you make sure that when the character looks at the other character, they look a little bit longer than maybe they normally would. Or a hand is seeming relaxed—until you are in closer with the hand, and then you see this person is not relaxed. It’s very much about contradictions. Everything in that language is about contradiction. You tell one thing with one kind of image and then you reveal something with another image that makes you see the first image in a completely different light.

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What does the editing room process look like for you?

I try to spend a long time in editing, not over-engaging. The thing for me as a director is very much about maintaining that fresh eye and that sense of, How is the audience, who has never seen it before, going to react? I try at all times to be super detailed and super engaged, but also keep a distance. I don’t want to read the script too many times. I don’t want to see the edit too many times. At the very, very end, everything is excruciatingly detailed. I always go, “Let’s just change this one frame for one, which is slightly different.” If you, as a director, don’t have those fresh eyes, things get boring. It’s very dangerous.

How did you decide to ask Nicole to sing the credit song?

[Laughs] I don’t know! We were playing around with the credits and I was like, What is this? And what should it be? Then I started hearing that song and imagining Nicole singing it. And I was like, “I’m just going to ask her to do it.” And she was like, “What?”

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If anyone is good at making fun of the Kardashian-Jenners, it’s…the Kardashian-Jenners. On Thanksgiving, Kylie Jenner posted a TikTok with her sister Kendall that shows they definitely know how to laugh at themselves.

“Dad’s fav,” Mom’s fav” the video reads. Kylie walks toward “Mom’s fav” and Kendall toward “Dad’s.” That one might be up to interpretation, depending on which family member you ask, but…we’ll take it.

The next options: “hoopers” and “rappers.” With their hands over their eyes and their heads down, each sister walks toward the labels. Kendall goes toward “hoopers” and Kylie toward “rappers.”

To be fair, they aren’t wrong. Kylie has been known to date musicians and rappers including Cody Simpson, Jaden Smith, Tyga, and her daughter’s father, Travis Scott.

Kendall has been linked to professional basketball players, including Devin Booker and Ben Simmons. She’s been rumored to date others, such as D’Angelo Russell, though she shut that report down pretty quickly in a tweet last July.

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“2 out of 5 accurate, thanks,” she responded to the above sexist meme going around about her. Kendall, who has been known to be private about her dating life, doesn’t often speak up about things like this, so this was a rare moment.

In the TikTok, the sisters also go on to poke fun at each other when it comes to their careers. When the labels “supermodel” an “Instagram model” come up on the video, Kendall saunters over to “supermodel” while Kylie tries to follow her. Kendall pushes her back to the “Instagram model” side.

Again…when it comes to deprecating humor, no one does it better.

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Spoilers for The Undoing episode 5, “Trial by Fury,” ahead.

Admit it: You gasped at the end of last Sunday’s The Undoing.

The HBO murder mystery, written by David E. Kelley and directed by Susanne Bier, built a pyre of tortuous, sometimes questionable twists over five episodes, then tossed a lit match during the final moments of its penultimate installment. Grace Fraser (Nicole Kidman), still puzzling over her inscrutable husband Jonathan’s (Hugh Grant) involvement in the brutal killing of his lover (Matilda De Angelis), finds the missing murder weapon in her son Henry’s (Noah Jupe) violin case.

“In murder mysteries, you always rule out the kid—because of innocence, because of the fact that they’re a child,” Jupe tells me over Zoom. “It’s one of the reasons I took the job, being part of that twist and right in the center of it. I loved exploring the fact that maybe Henry wasn’t innocent, maybe [he was] on the dark side, maybe he had his own secrets.”

Henry is a just another notable entry in Jupe’s already outstanding resume—at 15, the Brit is easily one of Hollywood’s most in-demand child actors, with pivotal roles in A Quiet Place, Ford v. Ferrari, and last year’s star-making Honey Boy. In fact, despite the tension of being central to a murder mystery, The Undoing is probably one of the actor’s less stressful roles to date: “There were some nice and easy scenes at the start,” he admits. “But it did get pretty deep pretty quickly, I do have to say.”

Along with shielding his character’s burden of guilt, Jupe more than holds his own alongside co-stars Kidman and Grant. Perhaps it’s because his seven-year-old brother keeps him down to earth? “He was like, ‘What are you choosing now Noah?’ And I said, ‘I’m shooting this thing where both the Paddington villains are playing my parents,'” Jupe laughs. “He was like ‘Oh. How does that work?'”

Ahead, Jupe talks untangling Henry’s motivations, creating the “unconditional love” of a family unit, and the shock you’re not expecting from tomorrow’s finale.

When you did your initial read through of the scripts, did you have any idea of where it was going? Did you think, Henry could be involved?

Oh, I wanted to be the murderer. I was like, “I’m the murderer for this reason, this reason, this reason.” But everyone was like that around the table [read]. Hugh was like, “I did it.” Nicole was like, “I did it.” Everyone was gambling over who did it. It was such a lively table on the day we read through the last episode. Everyone was so excited. You never get that in a read-through with the episodes. I’ve been a part of lots of movie read-throughs and you read it through in one go, but these were on separate days, and then it all led up to this final episode. It was almost as if we were watching it at the table.

Give me the general vibe in the room as you read through the finale.

It’s a journey of itself. It’s like a normal finale in the sense that it brings everything together—and then takes that on a journey. It’s like a movie. It’s that last episode that has its own arc. It’d work as a movie. And it was silent. It was very silent throughout that whole episode 6 [read] until the end. It definitely delivers.

How do you think people are going to react to the finale?

I think it’s going to be extremely satisfying to a lot of people. No one’s going to expect what happens. People might have predicted the outcomes, but the outcomes are given and then taken on a whole journey. No one it is expecting that. People might have predicted who it was, maybe, but no one’s expecting the journey you’re going to go through in the sixth episode.

I know Susanne has a very particular method. She makes you rehearse first thing every day, right?

She’s very fluid. There are lots of conversation involved. We get in in the morning and talk about the scenes, and then if we want to experiment, we experiment. And if Susanne wants to show us something, she shows us something. It felt like you were on the same level. It wasn’t a structure, just a free flow of ideas. And then by the end of that, everyone coms to the conclusion of how they wanted the scene to go. But it still wasn’t even strict, “That’s how the scene is going to be.” There was improvisation in the scenes, lots of experimenting, and I really got to give it to Susanne for creating that vibe on set and it being an efficient way of doing it, because that could get out of control.

What did rehearsal look like before you shot the final scene of episode 5?

Because we were in my bedroom, we had a whole day of that, and there’s a few scenes of my bedroom. I think we had the one with Donald and me at the violin, and then a couple of moments between me and my mom that were really deep and allowed us to create this bond between us as characters. What was fun was absolutely destroying that bond at the end of the day with this last scene. We’ve built up this trust throughout the day, and then this last scene was the realization that nothing is as it seems, that the truth is not necessarily the truth. It was really fun to play that and really fun, as two actors, to have that journey throughout the day.

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Throughout the course of the series, are you dropping hints for this bombshell? Or are you trying to play it as straight as possible?

Knowing my end, the journey as a whole, was good because I knew the truth of my character. And I had never really played a character before that you didn’t know everything about, that was hiding. That was really interesting in playing the scenes, knowing that there was this physical hammer attached to me constantly. And I reckon if you went back and watched the scenes, there are moments when my mom will say something and it’s like, “Do I tell her? Do I not?” Or she’ll say, “What about the murder weapon?” And then there’s a reaction from me.

I loved the scene with Henry and Jonathan walking through the park at the beginning of the pilot. It feels like a very real snapshot into a father/son relationship. How did you build that rapport with Hugh?

It was one of the first scenes we shot, and it was really cold. Terrible weather, but kind of beautiful. Central Park in the winter is stunning. The beauty of it, and the cold, me and Hugh sat next to each other in big coats shivering throughout the scene. That element broke the ice, excuse the pun. Me and Hugh got on quite well. We have a very similar sort of humor. From the read-through, getting to know him, making him laugh, him making me laugh, kind of built that relationship. And this scene, he’s really funny and it is such a nice, rhythmic scene between a father and a son. It just kind of came. We talked loads about it, but then when we actually started doing it, it all came together and felt instantly great. It came naturally.

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And then you contrast it with Henry visiting him in prison. Were you conscious of the parallels there?

That scene was really interesting, because seeing your dad and not being able to touch him was a huge thing. Knowing that he’s been put in there for a reason, not knowing if that reason is true or not, but still knowing he’s done something wrong to get himself in there—the trust between them is broken.

But honestly, within a family, there’s only unconditional love. It doesn’t stop as soon as someone does something. It’s not like a boyfriend and girlfriend, when someone cheats, it just goes [away]. There is that love that will always be there no matter what happens. So exploring that and exploring the fact that he can’t not care for his dad—he has to care for his dad and he wants him back, because ultimately he spent his whole life with this person as his father figure. For that anchor to go, in a moment of Henry’s life that’s so dramatically changing all of the time, is terrible for him. So he wants it back, and [that scene is] almost exploring the lengths he will go to believe certain things just so he can get his family back together.

I could not fathom why Henry would eat up all this TV coverage. I think I would try to avoid replaying the worst moment of my life. Why was Henry doing this?

There’s no answers around him—in terms of his parents, in terms of his grandfather. The only place there’s almost answers is the news. And Henry almost got into this mental state that he thinks that, at some point, something’s going to come out that resolves all of this. He needs to be [on his phone] so can run back to his dad and say, “It’s fine. It’s fine. We’re all going to get back together.” He’s constantly waiting for that moment, for that breaking news moment, when they say, “It wasn’t him, it was actually this person,” and everything can go back to normal. I’m sure he hates watching it. He absolutely hates seeing it all. But he has to.

Catch up on The Undoing on HBO Max

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In this weird age of quarantine and lockdown, everything is different. So, when Jennifer Lopez released her new single, “In the Morning” on Friday, she had to introduce it to her fans virtually. At 11:45 p.m. on Thanksgiving, Lopez had a virtual dance party with her fans, which served as the premiere for the song.

“Join me for a virtual Thanksgiving dance party ON Instagram Live TONIGHT at 11:45 pm EST! We’re celebrating the world premiere of #InTheMorning. There will be surprise #TurkeyEggs! Bring the whole fam!,” Lopez tweeted earlier in the week, along with her cover art for her song.

And dance she did. Lopez, joined by her twins, Emme and Max, her fiancé, Alex Rodriguez, and his daughters, Natasha and Ella, danced to J.Lo’s new track. Before the song officially premiered, the whole group counted down.

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This is not the first time this blended family has joined in a dance party together. This summer, they bopped along to 2000s hip-hop songs. The selection included Nelly’s “Dilemma,” OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson,” and 50 Cent’s “In Da Club.”

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“These bops had me hype! ✨✨ Party in Club Basement with Alex, Lulu, Ella Bella and Nick!,” Lopez wrote then.

This family really seems to enjoy spending some quality quarantine time together:

“This year, more than ever, #Thanksgiving carries a special meaning for all of us,” Rodriguez wrote on Thanksgiving this week. “Even in the most challenging of times, we need to count our blessings and celebrate what we have. Be thankful for family. Be thankful for friends. Be thankful for the people who make a difference in our lives. “What are you most thankful for?? Enjoy your feast today and have a safe and happy holiday! 🦃.”

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Happy new song release and happy Thanksgiving, Lopez-Rodriguez fam!

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Zac Efron and Vanessa Valladares have reportedly split after five months together, per The Sun. The two met after Efron relocated to Australia at the beginning of 2020, and they seemed to really hit things off for much of the year.

“Zac met Vanessa while she was an employee at the Byron Bay General Store & Cafe in June,” a source told Us Weekly. “Things moved quickly, and Vanessa spends most nights at Zac’s house. They are both very smitten with each other.”

In September, the couple was seen sharing some PDA while out in Byron Bay, and also went on an Australian ski vacation together this summer.

“Zac and Vanessa looked like the real deal,” a source told The Sun. “They were besotted with each other. So once he decided to stay in Australia long term, he suggested they buy their first home. They’d started to look at a few places but, sadly, fate wasn’t on their side. Zac’s work and the ­­enforced distance has really taken its toll.” The source continued, adding that there might not be much of a chance for a reunion: “Friends hope they can reunite, but it seems their relationship was more like a holiday romance than they cared to admit.”

The source said that Efron had suggested that he and Valladares, who works as both a model and restaurant employee, buy a house together at one point: “They’d started to look at a few places but, sadly, fate wasn’t on their side. Zac’s work and the ­­enforced distance has really taken its toll.”

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Another holiday, another opportunity for the Kardashian family to gather despite expert advice not to do so during a pandemic! On Thursday, many of the Kardashian-Jenners gathered at Kris’s Palm Springs home for Thanksgiving and showed off photos of their lavish get-together on Instagram. This choice to gather follows backlash the family has received for other gatherings and trips they’ve done this year, including Kim Kardashian’s 40th birthday island trip and Kendall Jenner’s 25th West Hollywood bash.

As BuzzFeed pointed out, the table appeared to be set for 14 people. The California Department of Public Health has, on its website, prohibited gatherings with more than three households. Ahead of Thanksgiving, the CDC recommended that no one from separate households spend the holiday together: “Gatherings with family and friends who do not live with you can increase the chances of getting or spreading COVID-19 or the flu,” the website reads. Farther down the page, the CDC provided guidance to those who did decide to gather, saying that wearing masks and staying six feet apart from anyone who does not live with you would help prevent the spread of the virus.

From the looks of it, the Kardashian-Jenners didn’t wear masks, and they all seemed to mingle with each other pretty freely.

“Kylie and I are nail twins, and we’re very festive,” Khloé Kardashian said on her Instagram story, as she and her youngest sister showed off their coordinating, Christmas-themed manicures. Kylie posted a photo of their matching nails on her Instagram:

The kiddos seemed to have a good time, too:

And they enjoyed quite the delicious-looking spread; Khloé caught Kourtney filling up her plate:

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There was a honey wall and a s’mores station:

On her story, Khloé said she made a couple of Oreo-based desserts, but it doesn’t seem as if Kourtney was really in the baking or cooking mood this year. Kylie called her oldest sister out on her Instagram story, saying, “Kourtney’s Thanksgiving contribution,” before showing a plate of potato chips and what looks like onion dip. “All day and night she worked on this.”

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Kylie also shared the place settings for the evening, which featured plates with very realistic-looking turkeys on them:

She shared a couple selfies with her mom, Kris, while they promoted Black Friday sales for Kylie’s skincare and cosmetics lines:

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To top it all, though, she and Kendall did this (admittedly hilarious) TikTok:

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Anyway. Wear a mask. Listen to the CDC. Happy Black Friday!

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