The Actors Have Been Unleashed! So What Now?

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This Week

The strike is over!

Mean Girls fans deserve better.

A weird takeaway from the Inside Out 2 teaser.

Barbra forever…and ever.

The things I’d write on a Post-It note…

The Actors Can Speak Again

Reports are that the airport lines all over the Mediterranean are packed. There’s a crisis shortage of private jets. Yachts engines are breaking down after speeding too fast across the Pacific. Plastic surgeons are fielding dozens of calls an hour from patients demanding to know how to make procedures look healed immediately.

After 118 days, the SAG-AFTRA strike is over, with a tentative deal reached between the union and the studios—may those Scrooge McDuck-ian bigwigs’ guilty consciences haunt them forever for making this last so long. As of Thursday—filming could once again resume. The actors have been unleashed.

I’m imagining the gates to the studio backlots opening and thousands of actors rushing through like it’s Black Friday at Wal-Mart in 2001. Or Los Angeles rattled by a deafening, unidentifiable buzzing noise from the cacophony made by all the returning thespians doing their enunciation vocal warm-ups all at once: “Rubber baby buggy bumpers, rubber baby buggy bumpers…” Here’s a live look at me as I watch my inbox pile up with pitches to interview talent, now able to promote their current work and all the projects over the last months that they weren’t able to talk about:

I am, of course, being glib. The absolute truth is that this is a monumental moment, a hard-fought and historic victory for labor rights that was won through great sacrifice. It’s easy to joke about major celebrities in relation to the strike and its conclusion, but the truth is that the work stoppage was in support of the journeyman union members whose livelihoods depended on terms secured by the new contract. And fighting for these gains hurt; it hurt everyone who was out work, whether actors or professionals in the sprawling web of industries who relied on film and TV production.

Everyone can take a breath now. Though only a quick one, because it is just that: time to get back to work.

The utter chaos there must be at the major publicity firms now that talent can promote their movies again, racing to get them booked, on TV, and in front of journalists. It’s a double firehose, too: Again, the goal now is to promote both upcoming projects and all the ones that premiered during the strike. (Shout out to the Broadway actors, podcasters, and reality TV stars who were booked on major talk shows all fall and were a delight, and who are now going to be unceremoniously bumped for the cast of The Marvels. Thank you for your service.)

While I’ve certainly missed the opportunity to talk to actors from some of my favorite projects about their work, or give a little smirk when a TV interview moment goes viral, it has (until now) been a fascinating time. What movies and series land when there is no actor-led charm offensive to generate buzz for it? And when it comes to award season, which is in full swing, what performances and films make a mark in a vacuum, when magazine cover stories, countless interviews, and “the machine” of it all aren’t a factor?

This is also new territory: playing catch-up. Cheekily, I wonder what actors, shows, and movies benefited because talent haven’t had the opportunity to put their feet in their mouths while talking about complicated issues? I’m also, however, ready for the actors I’ve been dying to hear from these past months—because their projects beg for spicy, complicated, star-making interviews—to finally hit the press trail again.

I don’t want to come off as pervy. However! These have been unbelievable times when it comes to brilliant, beautiful, nuanced, real, and absolutely horny-as-hell depictions of gay relationships, romance, and sex in pop culture. It’s been astonishing, really.

Bring back Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw from Passages, and Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez from Red, White & Royal Blue, for press immediately. Showtime, if I am not on a Zoom with Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer from Fellow Travelersin the next seven days, you will learn that The Ring was actually based on me. And, praise Gay God, because Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal will now be able to give us the steamy Oscar campaign their award-worthy work in All of Us Strangersdeserves.

Yes, some of these actors did advanced press in anticipation of a strike. But we’ve now seen the things! We’ve reacted to the things! We’ve pulled up scenes from the things late at night while alone! It’s time for more discourse.

I am very excited for the people who have delivered brilliant performances to take their victory laps as well. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, this your time to shine for breaking my heart into a million pieces in The Holdovers. Book those interviews and nab that Oscar nod. Get the Theater Camp cast out here and on the talk-show circuit they (and we) deserve. Carey Mulligan, let’s dig into that Maestro accent(s)! And on the flip side: Nicholas Braun, defend Cat Person!

This happened in the nick of time, because I truly can’t imagine this award season without hearing from Annette Bening talking about just how much she swam to prepare for Nyad. Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore are about to open a movie in which Portman plays an actress shadowing Moore, a teacher who married the student she controversially had an affair with, Mary Kay Letourneau-stye. Imagine not having a press tour for that.

Then there’s Emma Stone in Poor Things and Barry Keoghan in Saltburn. I fear that people would not properly understand how wild these films and performances are—in the best, we-should-all-be-talking-about-it way—if these actors weren’t properly publicizing them.

And it’s TV, too! The cast of Reservation Dogsdeserves a redo, after their finale aired during the strike. Have you heard about what’s happening on Gen V? We need to talk about it! Get me Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon in a Gilded Agepromo shoot immediately.

And, most pressing, we need Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon to answer some questions.

On Season 3 of The Morning Show, they sent Witherspoon to space. And that was just the first episode! There also was a restaging of the insurrection, Jon Hamm played a version of Elon Musk, and there was one of the weirdest post-coital scenes I’ve ever watched. Aniston was lying on top of Jon Hamm, crotch to bum, as if that’s how humans lounge after doing it. If you know, you know, because it’s been seared into your brain and is the image that you see each time you close your eyes. (Just blinked and shuddered again.) The world needs to talk about this.

It’s going to be an interesting time, as the rush for press and promotion launches like one of those scary roller coasters at amusement parks, or a rocket on The Morning Show inexplicably blasting TV anchors into space. I’m already strapped in.

Fetch Is Still Not Happening

I have never felt so attacked, violated, offended, and disturbed as I did this week while watching, of all things, the trailer for the new Mean Girls movie musical. It was as if I got hit by a bus. Before a few minutes of recreating scenes that, well, looked pretty familiar to the Mean Girls I watched in theaters when I was [age redacted], the trailer flashed the words: “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls.”

Excuse me? (Watch it here.)

First of all, this is only acceptable if you are referring to me and my friends who turned Mean Girls into a decades-spanning pop-culture phenomenon as “Mother,” the same way you do when Anne Hathaway serves a great red carpet look or Kelly Clarkson nails another cover song.

But if this is meant to age-shame? To insinuate that this movie is cooler than my generation’s version? The rudeness. But also, let me again articulate: This trailer hints at a movie that is exactly the same as the 2004 one—line for line, scene by scene. There is literally Tina Fey playing the same part. It would seem to be, in fact, exactly your mother’s Mean Girls. (How old do you think we are, by the way?)

Get in loser, we’re going to really go in now: What the hell is this trailer trying to sell? If you’re a keen reader, you will have noticed the words “movie musical” in that first sentence. And, being more of a Kevin Gnapoor than an Aaron Samuels—so smart you are!—you may have also noticed that no one in this trailer is singing, nor is there any hint that this movie is, in fact, a musical.

My breasts can always tell when something is afoot and, right now, my titties are predicting a 30 percent chance that a studio is trying to trick people into seeing a musical by pretending that it isn’t one. To which I say…why? I mean, to be fair, I’ve seen the Mean Girls musical on Broadway and heard the songs, so I can understand why they’re being hidden in this marketing campaign. (Put it in the Burn Book.) Nonetheless, it’s ludicrous to market a movie musical by disguising the fact that it is a musical.

Luckily, the internet agrees. If I could break my tiara and give a piece to each of you, I would. But in lieu of that, here’s a handful of my favorite reactions.

The Inside Out 2Teaser Is Here

If you are among the beautiful, protected souls who are not aware of how intensely some people sexualize human Disney/Pixar animated characters, I envy you—and I encourage you to retreat immediately. Do not read further.

But if you are among those fluent in the internet’s lust for the mom from The Incredibles’s sumptuous dump truck of a booty, or the greater universe of “Pixar dads who could absolutely destroy me” discourse, then it’s a big week for you. An MVP of that genre, the dad from Inside Out, is making his return to the spotlight, ready to be objectified by our depraved tweets about a cartoon dude with a mustache.

The first teaser for Inside Out 2 is now out (watch it here), and so are Bill Andersen’s (he has a name, people!) most lascivious fans.

A Great Time to Be a Barbra Fan

There are some pop-culture moments that you watch when you’re young, and, though you don’t know why, they end up being formative. You never forget them. When I first watched Barbra Streisand on The Oprah Winfrey Show, I wasn’t a wildly obsessed fan of either of them, the way that I am now. But something about the moment stuck, even if I was so young. (Just a wee baby, I swear!)

The moment in question is when Streisand revealed, after Oprah asked, that she had spray-painted the studio’s microphone “off-white,” to better match her sweater. Oprah could not hide her shock/disgust/thrill—every single emotion in the span of two seconds.

Memory of that surfaced because Streisand’s 992-page memoir was released this week, along with its 48-hour audiobook version. That’s right. Forty-eight-hour. That, somehow, seems even more Barbra than the Oprah microphone bit.

People Finally Got It Right

Then and now: Pick me. Choose me. Love me. **** me.

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Dream Scenario: A movie for all of us who have wondered, “Why is Nicolas Cage in my dream?” (In theaters)

The Curse: Get ready for the weirdest show of the year. (Now on Paramount+, Sun. on Showtime)

For All Mankind: This is the best show you’re not watching. So watch it! (Now on Apple TV+)

The Marvels: The Meh-vels. See what I did there? (Now in theaters)

It’s a Wonderful Knife: At least the title is good. (Now in theaters)

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