fellow travellers netflix

Is Fellow Travelers starring Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer on Netflix? (where to watch)

By reed gaudens | oct 30, 2023.

(L-R): Matt Bomer as Hawkins Fuller and Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin in FELLOW TRAVELERS, "You're Wonderful". Photo credit: Ben Mark Holzberg/SHOWTIME.

Ever since it was announced that Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey and Echoes star Matt Bomer were teaming up for the new show Fellow Travelers, the series became one of the most highly anticipated new titles of the year. Thankfully, it’s finally here.

Based on the book of the same name by Thomas Mallon, the miniseries takes place in the 1950s and centers on two men in Washington D.C. who find themselves in the midst of a budding romance amid the backdrop of American politics

Read the official synopsis for the series via Showtime :

"Created by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, Homeland), based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, FELLOW TRAVELERS is an epic love story and political thriller, chronicling the volatile romance of two very different men who meet in McCarthy-era Washington. Matt Bomer plays handsome, charismatic Hawkins Fuller, who maintains a financially rewarding, behind-the scenes career in politics. Hawkins avoids emotional entanglements – until he meets Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith. They begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on “subversives and sexual deviants,” initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history.Over the course of four decades, we follow our five main characters — Hawk, Tim, Marcus (Jelani Alladin), Lucy (Allison Williams), and Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts) – as they cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and in themselves."

Where to watch Fellow Travelers

Fellow Travelers isn’t available to watch on Netflix. Rather, it’s a Showtime original series, meaning it’s available to watch on the cable network. If you aren’t a cable subscriber, the show can also be watched on Paramount+ with Showtime . In order to watch the show on Paramount+, you must have the subscription with the Showtime add-on, which costs $11.99 per month.

The series premiered on Sunday, Oct. 29, and while new episodes begin streaming on Fridays , Showtime airs new episodes on Sundays at 9/8c. The miniseries will consist of seven total episodes and complete its run on Dec. 10. So far, the series has been receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics, landing a certified fresh rating of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes .

By next year, we will definitely be seeing Bailey and Bomer’s names in the running for Emmy Awards. I’m personally rooting for at least one of them to take home a long-deserved Emmy for their immense talents. Bailey made Bridgerton season 2 the best season yet as the season’s co-lead, and Bomer consistently turns in amazing performances, from White Collar and beyond. There’s no doubt they will both receive recognition for their latest incredible roles.

Even though the show isn’t available on Netflix, you can still watch similar shows on the streamer. For a period piece miniseries, try out Transatlantic, The Queen’s Gambit, and Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood . For more of the cast on Netflix, watch Bailey in Bridgerton and Crashing; Bomer in Echoes, The Boys in the Band, The Sinner, and the upcoming Maestro; and Allison Williams in Get Out, The Perfection, and A Series of Unfortunate Events .

Here’s the full main cast for the miniseries:

Matt Bomer as Hawkins Fuller
Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin
Jelani Alladin as Marcus Hooks
Linus Roache as Senator Wesley Smith
Noah J. Ricketts as Frankie Hines
Allison Williams as Lucy Smith

Watch the trailer for the series in the video below!

Will you be checking out Fellow Travelers on Paramount+ with Showtime?

Next. 48 best Netflix shows to watch (and 19 shows you should skip). dark

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We’re first introduced to Hawkins Fuller ( Matt Bomer ) during a going away party in the mid-1980s. He looks weathered, tan spots doting his temples along with sparse gray streaks, a smile plastered on his face so tight that it appears uncanny. He graces the party with a rehearsed familiarity, greeting guests before posing with a cake and his wife, daughter, and grandchild. He makes the perfect picture of a man who achieved the American dream until he turns his head and spots an old acquaintance whose presence could shatter all he’s built.

Marcus Hooks ( Jelani Alladin ), an old flame and friend, tells Hawk that a man named Tim ( Jonathan Bailey ) has requested that he give Hawk an old gift. If the '80s fashioned hairdos weren’t enough to point to the show's current period, mentions of Tim settling his affairs and the question of “How bad is it?” point to an AIDS diagnosis, which we later find Tim suffers from. Marcus leaves, but not before uttering, “You have a beautiful family. A beautiful life. I hope it was worth it.” Then, we are transported back to 1952, where Hawk and Tim first meet. They subtly flirt back and forth at a party before parting ways, but the gazes they leave upon each other's faces prove that this won’t be the last time they meet. This brief moment sparks both parties' decades-long pursuit of love and belonging.

Adapted from the 2007 novel of the same name, “Fellow Travelers” truly begins once the show turns back the clock and focuses on Tim and Hawkins’ initial meeting. From there, it becomes clear how different Hawk’s life in the 1950s is from his life in the 1980s. His happy and heterosexual life that we’re first introduced to is juxtaposed with a life that appears firmly routine. He goes to work as a State Department Official, his office dark and dreary, before leaving to meet an unnamed man to have sex with. No one accompanies him afterward on the dark walk home.

Finally, Hawk and Tim meet again in a park, where Hawk seems enamored with Tim’s drive to break into politics to do good. He finds Tim a job as a junior assistant, where his optimism soon becomes a point of contention between the two. They quickly begin a relationship filled with sex and, slowly, feelings. Yet, their differences of opinions and emotional maturity soon become a point of contention, as does their positions as gay men working in the government during the Lavender scandal era. From a deep scar on Hawk’s shoulder blade to reservations about his true politics, Tim realizes they may not understand each other beyond their physicality.

“I just wanna know you,” Tim utters one night as the two lay in bed together, to which Hawk replies with a grin that Tim does know him. To Hawk, sex is a means of knowing, but to Tim, sex cannot be where a relationship begins and ends. They are different people, which becomes even more apparent when Tim befriends a woman from work who happens to be a lesbian. Finally, amongst other queer people, Tim sees what life can look like for him. The power of community becomes an important thread as we’re transported off and on to the 1980s, where Tim is taken care of by Marcus and his drag queen-turned-activist boyfriend Frankie ( Noah J. Ricketts ) and a slew of others. In his dying months and weeks, community is the thing that keeps Tim going. Knowing that there are people who care for him and take activism and queer life as seriously as he does gives him a well-needed boost.

On the other hand, it appears that Hawk has become even more solitary over the years. His wife Lucy ( Allison Williams ) seems to know less about him than Tim, and he and his son have an even rockier relationship than Hawk and his own father. For him, this absence of community has led to a life devoid of joy. He continues to hide and, in doing so, continues on a path toward darkness that he may be unable to escape. As the decades pass, and tragedy continues to strike both men, Hawk becomes the one who needs taking care of, and it's in the drug-fueled, disco-hued backdrop of the 1970s that Tim and Hawk become the closest they may have ever been.

While there’s no doubt that Tim remains the heart of the show, thanks to stellar work by Bailey, Matt Bomer does his best work in years as Hawk. From the first time we see his uncanny smile and threatening aura when people stand in his way, Bomer commands the screen. It’s impossible to look away from him or be unmoved by his prowess, glares so piercing it almost feels as if he’s gazing through the screen. Beyond his anger and his aptness for deceit, Hawk has a deep-rooted sadness that only comes out in later episodes and that Bomer conveys with staggering ease.

“Did you come here for forgiveness?” Tim asks Hawk at one point early on in the series, and it does seem so for the first few episodes. Tim is more affectionate and longs for their relationship to feel real, which doesn't seem to bother Hawk. But, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that while Hawk doesn’t initially show it, he too is affected by the imposed secrecy their relationship faces. He appeases Tim in small ways, even gifting him cufflinks with his initials, proving he, too, values their bond. To Hawk, these cufflinks are a way for him to let the world know that Tim is his, though it's more unofficial than an engagement ring. Though they may not be able to exist like heterosexual couples, in Tim accepting this gift to show that he belongs to Hawk, the two can bond even more intimately.

The link between queerness and sex is intrinsic, and the creators of "Fellow Travelers" thankfully wholly understand this. From the first sex scene between Tim and Hawk, where their bodies harshly clash, to later sequences where their skin melds together like liquid gold amongst white sheets, the intimacy here is striking. Unlike certain peers in the queer sphere of cinema and television, the show looks at queerness with unwavering honesty, which makes the sex scenes almost staggering. There’s a brief sequence in episode seven, where Hawk and Tim navigate a gay cruising spot in the 1970s, that fully showcases the care of the show's creators. As they walk through the trees, glimmers of different bodies peek through the forest, the sun shining through and beaming off their skin as if the two are in a biblical garden.

Each body is displayed as if every blemish is important, as is each conversation between the show's characters. While some miniseries feel bloated with all they attempt to cover in such short episodes, no minute is wasted here. Even Marcus and Frankie, though they are supporting characters, add emotional weight to the adaptation's themes of ostracization outside and within the gay community. From bar raids to secrets and deception, each aspect of living in the dark bears a heavy weight upon the shoulders of each character, a weight so burdensome all of them eventually crumble underneath it.

Hiding and staying hidden may be the most present theme, but every thread remains intentional and essential. Through each decade we witness, this is a story about the complications of guilt and love and how each manifests differently for different people. The love between Tim and Hawk is never confused or abandoned for another plotline but woven into the show's other themes expertly. This is one of the best miniseries of the year.

All eight episodes were screened for review. "Fellow Travelers" premieres on Paramount+ on October 27th and Showtime on October 29th.

Kaiya Shunyata

Kaiya Shunyata is a freelance pop culture writer and academic based in Canada. They have written for RogerEbert.com, Xtra, Okayplayer, The Daily Beast, AltPress and more.

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Film credits.

Fellow Travelers (2023)

Matt Bomer as Hawk Fuller

Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin

Noah J. Ricketts as Frankie Hines

Will Brill as Roy Cohn

Andy Milne as Andre

Erin Neufer as Mary Johnson

Keara Graves as Miss Addison

Jane Moffat as Helen

Uta Briesewitz
Destiny Ekaragha
Daniel Minahan

Writer (based on the novel by)

Thomas Mallon

Writer (creator)

Ron Nyswaner
Brandon K. Hines
Dee Johnson
Katie Rose Rogers
Robbie Rogers
Jack Solomon

Cinematographer

Simon Dennis
Christopher Donaldson
Wendy Hallam Martin
Lara Johnston

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‘fellow travelers’ review: a superbly paired matt bomer and jonathan bailey give showtime’s sometimes stodgy miniseries its spark.

The actors play lovers whose relationship stretches from the Red Scare of the 1950s into the early years of the AIDS epidemic under Ronald Reagan.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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In the most lacerating episode of Max’s dearly departed comedy The Other Two , the characters attend the premiere of a Broadway show titled 8 Gay Men with AIDS: A Poem in Many Hours . Wondering about future roles for his Method-actor boyfriend, who stars in the play, Drew Tarver’s Cary wonders, “Is there anything coming up that is prestigious and gay, but doesn’t have, like, nonstop trauma in it?”

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Fellow Travelers Review: This Elegant Gay Love Story Transcends Most of Its Clichés

Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey are captivating as closeted bureaucrats navigating a tumultuous era

Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, Fellow Travelers

A show that evokes AIDS and McCarthyism in its first 10 minutes invites immediate apprehension. Oh, great, another buffet of gay anguish. You'd be forgiven for dismissing Fellow Travelers as a redundant exercise in historical hardship arriving in an age when queer media has graduated from such punishing retrospection. But over the course of its eight episodes, the first of which premieres Oct. 27 on Paramount+ With Showtime, the series finds an elegant, fitfully stirring lens on this defining segment of 20th century America.

Fellow Travelers inserts fictional protagonists into the all-too-real iniquity of Washington, where Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn's fearmongering made them the country's hypocrites-in-chief. Though the D.C. duo loom large in the show, they are a mere backdrop for the two closeted bureaucrats whose evolving political allegiances — and steamy romance — occupy its central interest. Hawkins Fuller ( Matt Bomer ) is a married war hero with a cushy position at the State Department, and Tim Laughlin ( Jonathan Bailey ) is a Christian idealist who lands a gig in McCarthy's office right in time for the senator to smear Communists and queers.

On paper, all of this sounds typical, even crushingly predictable. To be fair, it often is. Hawk and Tim are instantly smitten, and they spend much of the 1950s sneaking in and out of each other's apartments in the dark of night. But Fellow Travelers doesn't rest on easy moral righteousness. Hawk and Tim are themselves flawed. Love that lives in the shadows can't truly shine, and as the series waltzes back and forth across a 30-year span, the men's devotion to each other and to their political principles recedes in fascinatingly complex ways.

Fellow Travelers

Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey are steamy and captivating leads
A compelling lens on political hypocrisies
Visually elegant
The series runs a bit too long
It can't avoid gay trauma clichés

Ron Nyswaner , who wrote the scripts for Philadelphia and last year's Harry Styles vehicle My Policeman , oversaw the adaptation of Travelers , which is based on a 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon. Because this is familiar narrative territory for Nyswaner, he has a knack for conjuring the nuances of a generation tainted by persecution. Even if the sepia gloss that director Daniel Minahan ( Deadwood , American Crime Story ) establishes in the opening episodes constitutes a prestige-TV cliché, it adds a gentleness to the proceedings. Compared to the dim government offices where blowhards wield power, the glow that illuminates Tim and Hawk's liaisons looks tender and dreamy.

The eight hour-long episodes cover a lot of ground, from Vietnam War protests to the assassination of Harvey Milk and the onset of the HIV crisis. Fellow Travelers' inaugural moments establish where the show will more or less end: in 1986, with Tim dying of AIDS. The intervening flashbacks chronicle two men as they vacillate between hiding their identities and rebelling against norms. As Tim exchanges religion for progressive fervency, Hawk maintains a conservative ruse with his picture-perfect wife (a well-cast Allison Williams ). The men flit in and out of each other's clutch, finding more intimacy together than they can with anyone else.

Bomer and Bailey are captivating. Their chemistry far surpasses the mechanical dullness that has become common in TV pairings. In the show's many sex scenes, the actors exhibit the sort of heat lacking in most of today's mainstream filmmaking. But it's the smaller moments that are the most telling. As the hyper, eager-to-please Tim, Bailey is fidgety and wide-eyed, his naivete curdling as his grasp of the world hardens. Hawk is the cocksure elder statesman, holding power over Tim until both start to realize that Hawk's self-obfuscation is no guidepost. They're at once lovers and foils, a dynamic familiar to a similarly closeted journalist friend ( Jelani Alladin ) who has his own awakening as he watches underground gay bars become police targets.

The rub of Fellow Travelers is that it very much overstays its welcome. The time-hopping structure leads to late revelations about the ways Tim and Hawk have helped and hurt each other over the years, but by the final two episodes, that mix of tenderness and turbulence feels redundant. Nyswaner and the other writers, which include former Nashville showrunner Dee Johnson and Harlem alum Brandon K. Hines, could have trimmed at least an hour off the show without short-changing its many threads. How many reminders of Hawk's wife's suspicions do we really need?

Still, this is a well-considered tour of American turpitude. If the ending veers toward the trauma buffet that pop culture has finally done away with, it's offset by the swoony love story that grounds the show. Not all history lessons need to be left in the past.

Premieres: The first episode premieres Friday, Oct. 27 on Paramount+ With Showtime before airing Sunday, Oct. 29 at 9/8c on Showtime, with subsequent episodes debuting weekly Who's in it: Matt Bomer, Jonathan Bailey, Allison Williams, Jelani Alladin, Will Brill , Chris Bauer Who's behind it: Ron Nyswaner, showrunner For fans of: Philadelphia, Brokeback Mountain , and other gay dramas How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8

‘Fellow Travelers’ delivers a steamy saga about bittersweet love

In showtime’s limited series, two men with surprising politics grapple with history, and each other.

“Fellow Travelers,” Showtime’s steamy, bittersweet series about two men in love, covers an extraordinary amount of historical ground — including the Lavender Scare, the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis — with a deft hand and a light touch. Yes, there’s a lot of sex. (It wouldn’t be entirely misleading to call this the “gay ‘Outlander.’”) But Ron Nyswaner’s adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel is in other respects an intriguingly restrained project: Despite its scope and subject matter, the eight-episode series largely resists the impulse to moralize or devolve (as many a lesser show has) into an enraging but didactic history lesson. The show refuses to identify as a tragedy, though it easily could; the arc fits. And without billing itself as an anthropology of gay Americans in the ’50s (or, indeed, the ’60s through ’80s), the series efficiently sketches out the wide variety of ways a wide variety of queer people coped, copulated and compromised.

The emphasis, here, is on “compromised.” This is a show where people make ugly choices. “Fellow Travelers” remains more curious than judgmental about that, focusing more on how social worlds and certain temperaments intersect than on aligning its characters with present-day perspectives. Or, indeed, with their “fellows”: The title refers of course to the communism Sen. Joseph McCarthy was busily rooting out, but winks at his rumored homosexuality, too. While introducing the Lavender Scare, the show is admirably casual in its treatment of McCarthy’s alleged preferences and those of his chief counsel, Roy Cohn. There is no particular expectation (in ways that feel true for the period) that theory match practice.

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This isn’t, in that sense, a bossy show.

The same can’t be said for the limited series’s protagonist, Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer), an assertive gay man closeted by necessity while he works for the State Department in the 1950s (and who remains closeted long after it was strictly necessary). A charismatic careerist at the department, “Hawk,” who’s casual about assignations, unencumbered by guilt or shame and uninterested in relationships, fixates on Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) at a party celebrating Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election. Laughlin — whose beverage of choice is milk — is nervy and idealistic. His passions include Catholicism, rooting out the communist menace and, soon, Hawkins himself — after the latter gets him a job working for McCarthy, seduces him and makes him slink away in the middle of the night so they don’t get caught.

Laughlin, who suffers moral agonies trying to reconcile his sexuality with his faith, is the show’s center. His sincerity and ideological passion — which shifts over the course of life from anti-communism to progressive causes, making him an immensely sympathetic, confused and thoroughly recognizable type — anchor a relationship that is structurally unequal. Hawk’s dominance is rendered erotically as well as professionally through sexual positions, dirty talk, loaded condescension and underhanded asks. Brazenly unconflicted by moral considerations, he makes Laughlin report back to him on McCarthy’s activities and eventually marries the right woman for his career.

Cads aren’t new. And Bomer (to his credit) saves Hawk from coming across as beyond redemption, despite many pretty shocking betrayals. These are not, in the main, sexual. Though we frequently see Hawk with other partners, it isn’t a problem (as framed) that, in this love story, only one party finds sexual connection to be spiritual connection, too. The sex that Tim and Hawk have becomes notable, therefore, for how hot it is, how programmatically it changes to reflect their evolving relationship and for how poorly it captures what they mean to each other.

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What most satisfies here is the unpredictable way these men’s stories develop across all that history. Tim increases in stridency and strength as Hawk’s understanding of himself as pragmatic and sharklike starts to crumble under the increasingly real pull of his “fake” attachments (to his wife, played with stoic reserve by Allison Williams; to his children; and to Tim).

This is rich stuff. Cads aren’t interesting, but the points at which their caddishness gets punctured can be, and Bomer renders Hawk’s louche confidence — and peculiar desire for respectability — as variously compelling, fragile and pathetic. Bailey, whom I last saw playing Anthony in the second season of “Bridgerton,” is sensational (and unrecognizable) here. He plays Tim with an irritable intelligence at odds with his submissiveness, governed by moral compulsions that sometimes become downright inquisitorial. As a perennial outsider, Tim becomes the lens through which we see various versions of queer community: their secrecy, their beautiful appeal, their utopian aspects and, sometimes, their monstrousness. It is a strange and surprising pleasure to watch this character evolve.

The show boasts a strong supporting cast, including Jelani Alladin as Marcus Hooks, a Black gay journalist struggling to serve both his communities, and Noah J. Ricketts as Frankie Hines, a drag queen who eventually becomes an activist. Their journey toward communal struggle — and protest, and action — takes place against the backdrop of Harvey Milk’s assassination.

The series’s greatest achievement is its commitment to its characters as characters — dwelling gently on their peculiarities and inconsistencies and never letting them become allegories for larger struggles. I want to be clear: “Fellow Travelers” is extremely interested in the politics of the periods it covers. Fascinating details emerge during the Lavender Scare period of the show, for example, when the government was rooting out employees suspected of homosexuality. Several characters get the works: lie detectors, searches, interrogations and peculiar tests including one where subjects were asked to read passages from “Of Human Bondage.”

But the show’s loyalties are clear. It takes Tim a much longer time than it should to disavow Joseph McCarthy. Doesn’t matter. Even when they’re wrong — and this feels correct, because that’s what so much of love is, right? — the series sticks to Tim and Hawk.

Fellow Travelers premieres on Paramount Plus with Showtime Oct. 27, with subsequent episodes airing weekly. It will debut on Showtime Oct. 29.

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'Fellow Travelers' Official Trailer with Matt Bomer & Jonathan Bailey

by Alex Billington October 3, 2023 Source: YouTube

"We should be careful… everybody lies about something." Showtime has debuted their full official trailer for the LGBTQ series titled Fellow Travelers , adapted from the book of the same name by Thomas Mallon. It's arriving for streaming at the end of October. The mini-series is a decades-long chronicle of the risky, volatile and steamy relationship between the charismatic and ambitious Hawk and the pious and idealistic Tim, two political staffers who fall in love at the height of the 1950s Lavender Scare. This is only the start. After a chance encounter in Washington D.C., Hawkins Fuller & Timothy Laughlin start a volatile romance that spans "the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and in themselves." Matt Bomer & Jonathan Bailey co-stars as Hawkins & Timothy, respectively, along with Allison Williams , Jelani Alladin , Noah J. Ricketts , Linus Roache , Will Brill , Chris Bauer , Erin Neufer , and Matt Visser . This looks like a vividly passionate series, with plenty of love and despair on display as it follows them through the decades.

Here's the main official trailer (+ poster) for Showtime's series Fellow Travelers , direct from YouTube :

You can rewatch the teaser trailer for Showtime's Fellow Travelers series right here for the first look again.

Created by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers is an epic love story and political thriller, chronicling the volatile romance of two very different men who meet in McCarthy-era Washington. Matt Bomer plays handsome, charismatic Hawkins Fuller, who maintains a financially rewarding, behind-the scenes career in politics. He avoids emotional entanglements – until he meets Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith. They begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy & Roy Cohn declare war on "subversives & sexual deviants," initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history. Over the course of four decades, we follow our five main characters -- Hawk, Tim, Marcus (Jelani Alladin), Lucy (Allison Williams), Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts) – as they cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing many obstacles in the world…

Fellow Travelers is a series created by American writer Ron Nyswaner (screenwriter of Gross Anatomy, Love Hurts, Philadelphia, The Painted Veil, Filthy Gorgeous, Freeheld, My Policeman ; TV writer on "Ray Donovan", "Homeland"). Adapted from the novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon. Featuring episodes directed by Uta Briesewitz and Daniel Minahan. Nyswaner and Bomer executive produce along with Robbie Rogers ( All American, My Policeman ). Daniel Minahan (Halston, American Crime Story: Versace) executive produces and directs the first two episodes. Co-produced by Fremantle with Showtime, Fellow Travelers was made in Toronto. Showtime will debut the Fellow Travelers mini-series streaming on Paramount+ and Showtime starting on October 27th, 2023 coming soon this fall. Look good? Anyone want to watch this?

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Fellow Travelers: release date, cast, plot, trailer, interview, episode guide and all about the drama with Bridgerton's Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer

Fellow Travelers is a political thriller and love story that stars Bridgerton's Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer.

Fellow Travelers on Paramount Plus and Showtime sees Jonathan Bailey joining Matt Bomer for a political thriller with a secret gay relationship at its heart.

Fellow Travelers is a political thriller and epic love story that spans decades and starts during of the darkest times in American history, during the so-called McCarthy era of the 1950s.

Created by Ron Nyswamer — the man behind the Tom Hanks' movie Philadelphia and spy thriller Homeland — and based on the novel Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon , the story follows a clandestine romance between the charismatic Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer), who works in politics, and young idealist Tim Laughlin (Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey). The pair meet just as US Senator Joseph McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn declare that homosexuality is sexual deviancy, and the series follows the pair against the backdrop of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War, the drug-fuelled hedonism of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Showtime and Paramount Plus series Fellow Travelers …

Fellow Travelers release date

Fellow Travelers is an eight-part series that launched on Paramount Plus with Showtime in the US and Canada on Friday October 27 2023, then on Paramount Plus on Saturday October 28 in the UK, Australia, Latin America, South Korea, Italy, Germany Switzerland and Austria. It's a major drama during the Autumn TV season for 2023.

* How to watch Fellow Travelers : stream the historical romance drama including air date

* Paramount Plus price: cost, deals and content for the streaming service .

* Sign up for Paramount Plus here.

Is there a trailer for Fellow Travelers?

Paramount Plus and Showtime have both released trailers for Fellow Travelers. So do take a look at both below...

Yes a teaser trailer for Fellow Travelers was released by Paramount which shows a very tense drama. We see Hawkins and Tim walk past one another in the corridors of power, with flashbacks to their secret and potentially explosive romance. Take a look below at the trailer and a tweet about the show.

There are eyes everywhere. #FellowTravelers premieres 28 October on Paramount+ UK & Ireland pic.twitter.com/7KQajLiTcI August 17, 2023

Fellow Travelers plot

Fellow Travelers follows a secret romance between two very different men – the rich Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and the young Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) who is brimming with idealism and religious faith. They start a romance, but Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn have just declared war on ‘subversives and sexual deviants’ so their love could cost them everything. We follow them, alongside three other characters – Marcus (Jelani Alladin), Lucy (Allison Williams) and Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts) - as they cross paths over the next four decades.

When Hawkins Fuller (American Horror Story’s Matt Bomer), an influential staffer working for a US Senator, meets aspiring politico Tim Laughlin (Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey) at a Washington fundraiser, the attraction between the two men is instant.

The problem is that the year is 1952, and Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (For All Mankind’s Chris Bauer) is about to announce his intention to stamp out ‘subversives and sexual deviants’ in the US government.

The drama follows the love story between Hawk and Tim over four turbulent decades including the Vietnam War and AIDS crisis, as they keep getting pulled back into each other’s orbit.

"It’s so compelling to have a powerful attraction between people who view life very differently," says Ron Nyswaner, the show’s creator and executive producer. "They are, in many ways, not suited to each other, but they are powerfully drawn together. And they’re in a very high-pressured, high stakes environment, where their attraction to each other could ruin their lives.?"

In order to maintain his cover, Hawk marries his friend Lucy ( Girls star Allison Williams), who is also the daughter of his boss, Senator Wesley Smith ( My Policeman ’s Linus Roache).

"Lucy and Hawk have this delicious relationship of having known each other since childhood,’ explains Nyswaner. ‘There was always an assumption that they would get married someday - and what’s compelling to me about Lucy is, what does she know about Hawk and what doesn’t she know? What are we willing to not face, if we get to be with somebody we care about?

"Lucy and Tim are in a similar situation where they both desire this man, and are both willing to give up certain things to have him - but at a certain point, they will pay a price for that.’

The series’ timeline spans from the McCarthy era through to the Aids crisis of the 1980s and runs on a non-linear narrative, which Nyswaner admits occasionally caused some confusion during production.

‘Part of my job on set was to keep everybody clear,’ he recalls. ‘There were times when, in a given day, we were in three different decades - that was really challenging for the designers and the crew!’

Fellow Travelers on Paramount Plus sees Jonathan Bailey joining Matt Bomer for a political thriller with a secret gay relationship at its heart.

Follow Travelers cast — Matt Bomer as Hawkins Fuller

Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, who has made a career for himself behind the scenes in politics.

Crucial to the success of Fellow Travelers was finding two actors with the right chemistry, and Nyswaner explains that Bomer - who also serves as executive producer on the series - and Jonathan Bailey as Tim perfectly captured the longing that keeps their characters coming back to each other.

"Matt has the ability to signal what’s going on inside without having to tell you,’ says Nyswaner. "Hawkins’ inner life is hidden from the world, because it’s too risky to share that with other human beings.

"Tim’s the opposite - his emotions are on the surface, and Jonny does that very well, that incredible nervous energy that he embodies of just wanting something so powerfully. Because of that, I think the audience will want him to get Hawk - even though it’s probably not going to be good for Tim if he does."

* Matt Bomer has previously starred in Magic Mike , In Time, White Collar, Will & Grace, The Normal Heart, Tru Calling, American Horror Story: Hotel, The Magnificent Seven and The Sinner .

Matt Bomer as Hawkins Fuller in Fellow Travelers.

Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin

Jonathan Bailey is playing Hawkins Fuller's secret lover Tim Laughlin.

Jonathan Bailey is best known for playing Lord Anthony Bridgerton in the hit Netflix series Bridgerton and has also starred in W1A, Hooten and The Lady, Crashing, Broadchurch, Leonardo and Baddiel’s Syndrome . He will star in the upcoming movie Wicked , playing Fiyero.

Who else is starring in Fellow Travelers?

There's a great remaining cast for Fellow Travellers which includes Jelani Alladin ( Tick, tick.. BOOM! , The Walking Dead: World Beyond ) who plays Marcus Hooks, while Allison Williams ( Get Out, Girls ) is Lucy Smith and Noah J. Ricketts ( American Gods ) plays Frankie Hines. Linus Roache will play Senator Wesley Smith while Chris Bauer is Senator Joe McCarthy and Will Brill is Roy Cohn.

Fellow Travelers episode guide

Here's a brief episode guide for Fellow Travelers. Remember the episodes are released weekly from October 27 2023 (in the US) and October 28 (in the UK)...

Episode 1 It's tje 1950s in Washington DC and the atmosphere is febrile as it's the Joseph McCarthy which suspicions of communist infiltration into US society are running high and any accusations could ruin a career in an instant. Hawkins Fuller is a war hero moving up the ladder at the State Department. when Hawk meets religious Tim Laughlin and they begin an affair that puts them in jeopardy.

Episodes 2 to 8 Please do check back as we'll be adding weekly information.

Behind the scenes and more on Fellow Travelers

Matt Bomer and Nyswaner executive produce Fellow Travelers with Robbie Rogers ( All American, My Policeman) and Dee Johnson . Daniel Minahan (Halston, American Crime Story: Versace) executive produces and direct the first two episodes. The series is co-produced by Fremantle and Paramount+.

* Other big dramas currently showing or coming soon to Paramount Plus...

* The Castaways * A Gentleman in Moscow * No Escape * Sexy Beast * The Killing Kind * Fatal Attraction * The Gymnasts * The Flatshare

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Here's When Every Fellow Travelers Episode Drops

The show will be streaming first on Paramount+, then air on Showtime.

preview for Fellow Travelers - Official Trailer (Showtime)

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Based on the book of the same name by Thomas Mallon , the plot follows two men—Hawkins (Matt Bomer) and Tim ( Jonathan Bailey )—beginning in 1950s McCarthy-era Washington, D.C. (Jelani Alladin, Allison Williams, and Noah J. Ricketts also star in the show.) “The thing that really appealed to me was an unflinching look at gay life,” Daniel Minahan, an executive producer, tells Town & Country . “It forces you to imagine what you would do in a similar situation.”

The show will stream on Showtime and Paramount+ with Showtime , and two days later, will air on the Showtime cable channel. The episodes will drop on streaming on Fridays, and then air on Sundays at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific.

Here, a guide to when the eight Fellow Travelers episodes drop:

Episode 1, "You're Wonderful": October 27, 2023 (streaming) and October 29, 2023 (cable)
Episode 2, "Bulletproof": November 3, 2023 (streaming) and November 5, 2023 (cable)
Episode 3, "Hit Me": November 10, 2023 (streaming) and November 12, 2023 (cable)
Episode 4, "Your Nuts Roasting on an Open Fire": November 17, 2023 (streaming) and November 19, 2023 (cable)
Episode 5, "Promise You Won't Write": November 24, 2023 (streaming) and November 26, 2023 (cable)
Episode 6, "Beyond Measure": December 1, 2023 (streaming) and December 3, 2023 (cable)
Episode 7, "White Nights": December 8, 2023 (streaming) and December 10, 2023 (cable)
Episode 8, "Make it Easy": December 15, 2023 (streaming) and December 17, 2023 (cable)

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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Fellow Travelers (2023)

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Fellow Travelers - watch online: streaming, buy or rent

Currently you are able to watch "Fellow Travelers" streaming on fuboTV, Paramount+ with Showtime, Paramount Plus Apple TV Channel , Paramount+ Amazon Channel, Showtime Roku Premium Channel, Showtime, Spectrum On Demand, Showtime Apple TV Channel.

Newest Episodes

S1 e8 - make it easy, s1 e7 - white nights, s1 e6 - beyond measure, where does fellow travelers rank today the justwatch daily streaming charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. this includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. this includes data from ~1.3 million movie & tv show fans per day..

Streaming charts last updated: 1:16:56 PM, 04/19/2024

Fellow Travelers is 354 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The TV show has moved up the charts by 51 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Doctor Who but less popular than Hacks.

Follows the lives and volatile romance of two different men, through purges, wars, protests, and plagues, overcoming obstacles in the world.

Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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‘Fellow Travelers’

To say Fellow Travelers is simply excellent would be reductive, because the series is so much more: it’s lavish and complex, somber and scary, gripping and downright sexy. The political romantic thriller is based on a novel by the same name that takes a well-known period of American history and views it through the fictional lens of a secret romance between two men. It spans decades, opening in the thick of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s before flashing back to the 50s, when McCarthyism was reaching its peak. Matt Bomer is his usual charming self as Hawkins Fuller, the right hand man to a senator, who keeps his fair share of secrets. But it’s Jonathan Bailey , primarily known for his portrayal of the rakish Viscount on Bridgerton , who steals every scene he’s in as naive Tim Laughlin, a devout Catholic conservative new to D.C. who genuinely believes in Senator McCarthy’s platform. From their first interaction, it’s clear that Bomer and Bailey have sizzling chemistry, and that only intensifies as the pair fall into a certain power dynamic during sex scenes . The bad news is that Fellow Travelers is a miniseries, so our time with these characters is finite — the good news, though, is that only two episodes have aired, so there’s plenty of time to catch up so you can enjoy the rest of Hawk and Tim’s story as it unfolds.

Where to Stream:

Fellow travelers, more recommendations, our guide to the best movies and tv shows streaming online, updated daily..

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Is Fellow Travelers starring Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer on Netflix? (where to watch)

E ver since it was announced that Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey and Echoes star Matt Bomer were teaming up for the new show Fellow Travelers, the series became one of the most highly anticipated new titles of the year. Thankfully, it's finally here.

Read the official synopsis for the series via Showtime :

Created by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, Homeland), based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, FELLOW TRAVELERS is an epic love story and political thriller, chronicling the volatile romance of two very different men who meet in McCarthy-era Washington. Matt Bomer plays handsome, charismatic Hawkins Fuller, who maintains a financially rewarding, behind-the scenes career in politics. Hawkins avoids emotional entanglements – until he meets Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith. They begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on "subversives and sexual deviants," initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history. Over the course of four decades, we follow our five main characters — Hawk, Tim, Marcus (Jelani Alladin), Lucy (Allison Williams), and Frankie (Noah J. Ricketts) – as they cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and in themselves.

Where to watch Fellow Travelers

Fellow Travelers isn't available to watch on Netflix. Rather, it's a Showtime original series, meaning it's available to watch on the cable network. If you aren't a cable subscriber, the show can also be watched on Paramount+ with Showtime . In order to watch the show on Paramount+, you must have the subscription with the Showtime add-on, which costs $11.99 per month.

By next year, we will definitely be seeing Bailey and Bomer's names in the running for Emmy Awards. I'm personally rooting for at least one of them to take home a long-deserved Emmy for their immense talents. Bailey made Bridgerton season 2 the best season yet as the season's co-lead, and Bomer consistently turns in amazing performances, from White Collar and beyond. There's no doubt they will both receive recognition for their latest incredible roles.

Even though the show isn't available on Netflix, you can still watch similar shows on the streamer. For a period piece miniseries, try out Transatlantic, The Queen's Gambit, and Ryan Murphy's Hollywood . For more of the cast on Netflix, watch Bailey in Bridgerton and Crashing; Bomer in Echoes, The Boys in the Band, The Sinner, and the upcoming Maestro; and Allison Williams in Get Out, The Perfection, and A Series of Unfortunate Events .

Here's the full main cast for the miniseries:

Matt Bomer as Hawkins Fuller
Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin
Jelani Alladin as Marcus Hooks
Linus Roache as Senator Wesley Smith
Noah J. Ricketts as Frankie Hines
Allison Williams as Lucy Smith

Watch the trailer for the series in the video below!

Will you be checking out Fellow Travelers on Paramount+ with Showtime?

Is Fellow Travelers starring Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer on Netflix? (where to watch)

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Fellow Travelers

Where to watch.

Watch Fellow Travelers with a subscription on Paramount+.

Cast & Crew

Ron Nyswaner

Hawkins "Hawk" Fuller

Jonathan Bailey

Tim Laughlin

Noah J. Ricketts

Frankie Hines

Allison Williams

Popular TV on Streaming

Tv news & guides, this show is featured in the following articles., series info.

'Fellow Travelers' Review: Showtime's Romance Lets Down Too Many Characters

The series offers plenty of room for its two leads, but not much for everybody else.

The Big Picture

Fellow Travelers sheds light on the echoes of homophobia and the lasting impact it has on individuals and relationships.
Starring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, this historical romance series focuses on their characters' years-long relationship.
The series fails to fully explore the experiences of transgender, queer, and intersex individuals during the McCarthy era, and sidelines the stories of Black and female characters.

When I was 18 years old, I landed my very first job at a construction company, often known as a place where homophobia is normalized. I was fully aware of it from the get-go, which is why I was extremely careful of how I walked, talked, and gestured. I listened to homophobic slurs throughout my whole time there, but I felt “safe” because I acted straight. One day, however, I heard one of my superiors describing a heated argument he'd heard from his neighbors, a same-sex couple. He was baffled by the notion that these two men had been arguing as if they were capable of having feelings for each other. I didn’t speak up, didn’t let him know how dehumanizing that was, partly because he was my superior and he could create a hard time for me at work if he'd wanted to, but mostly because speaking up would be equivalent to outing myself, and I knew there was no coming back from that. For those who have been through similar experiences, the Showtime series Fellow Travelers will hit uncomfortably close to home, reminding us that the echoes of institutionalized homophobia can still be heard to this very day. Unfortunately, that's the only thing the series does well.

Based on the novel of the same name by author Thomas Mollon , the show centers around Hawkins "Hawk" Fuller ( Matt Bomer ), a man who is perfectly comfortable with his sexuality but believes that, during the Joseph McCarthy ( Chris Bauer ) era, he has no choice but to live a closeted life. That doesn’t stop him from striking up a relationship with Tim "Tippy" Laughlin ( Jonathan Bailey ), an idealist who’s starting to realize that the U.S. isn’t exactly the country that it advertises itself to be.

Fellow Travelers

A decades-long chronicle of the risky, volatile and steamy relationship between the charismatic and ambitious Hawk and the pious and idealistic Tim, two political staffers who fall in love at the height of the 1950s Lavender Scare. Through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco culture of the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the two men’s fiery affair only intensifies despite the constant threat of being exposed and losing everything.

Hawk Is a Fully Developed Character in 'Fellow Travelers,' but Few Others Are

It’s pretty easy to understand the situation that Hawk is in. Working inside the U.S. government, he has firsthand knowledge of what is being done on a daily basis to the LGBTQIA+ community , and the fear that it provokes in him. Back in the '50s, getting labeled as a homosexual was almost as bad as being labeled a Communist, and as McCarthyism started to grow, that distinction became increasingly less important to the powers that be.

In that regard, Fellow Travelers does a good job of illustrating how a state of paranoia benefits no one and establishes a witch-hunt culture in which people can’t trust each other, relationships get torn apart, and minorities always get the shorter end of the stick . The series also showcases how that means innocent people can and do end up caught in the crossfire — but this is where Fellow Travelers ' biggest problems start. Even though Hawk’s delicate position is made perfectly clear, and we can absolutely understand every questionable and even cruel choice he makes from beginning to end of the series, Fellow Travelers is quick to forgive and forget its main character throughout the episodes. Hawk is not a good husband , probably not a good father, and shows no remorse when needing to throw someone under the bus for his own benefit. But the show doesn’t want us to pay too much attention to that as it wants us to witness the beautiful and tragic love story that he lived.

That juxtaposition wouldn't be a problem if the series at least presented Hawk as someone you shouldn't admire. However, his good and bad actions are shown with equal measure, as if they could cancel each other out. That's not the case. Some of Hawk's actions are even criminal, and no amount of cute things he says and does to Tippy compensate for his past — not to mention the fact that his main romance is problematic as well.

'Fellow Travelers' Has a Romance Problem

Fellow Travelers goes out of its way to romanticize Hawk and Tippy’s relationship, to the point of ignoring – or barely acknowledging – that Hawk’s presence in Tippy’s life is toxic at the very least. Without giving too much away, the more time we spend with the couple, the clearer it becomes that Hawk is on a destructive path, is aware of it, and has no problem bringing Tippy down with him. The worst part is that it all seems done in order to create a path toward a heartfelt ending of a story that is pretty easy to predict. While watching a romance stretch for years is enjoyable, it’s ironic that a series with the intention of showing how our community has been systematically dehumanized and erased by the American government does just that to its supporting characters.

Fellow Travelers doesn’t seem interested at all in going too far down the LGBTQIA+ legend. In fact, it sits comfortably at the B and dips a toe into the T, which essentially reproduces an error that stories keep making . It ignores that transgender, queer, and intersex people existed at that time, but are constantly kept as footnotes. Making the McCarthy era and the HIV epidemic the backdrop of our stories is exposing how little regard society had for our community, but we can’t just do the same. This is why documentaries like The Stroll are extremely relevant to modern filmmaking, giving a voice and platform to people who have been silenced for far too long.

Marcus and Frankie Are Left Behind in 'Fellow Travelers'

Fellow Travelers does the bare minimum in featuring Black and female characters. Take, for example, the Marcus ( Jelani Alladin ) and Frankie ( Noah J. Ricketts ) storylines. The former is originally presented as having similarities with Hawk when it comes to sex and affection, but changes throughout the series. However, we never witness that change, not in the way that we see every bit of Hawk's story. For Marcus and Frankie, it feels like the series is keeping up with their stories only to check off some boxes, rather than fleshing out their romance. A similar fate happens to Lucy ( Allison Williams ), who is stuck in supportive wifey mode throughout the whole season and is forgotten about when Hawk's story doesn't need her anymore.

The same can be said about how Fellow Travelers chooses to depict the absurdities within the McCarthy administration in the '50s. McCarthy himself and his posse are presented as one-dimensional Disney villains with scarred or weird faces (if you are familiar with Bauer’s work, you’ll be constantly distracted by his nose) whose scenes only serve the purpose of stressing how absurd the era was. Meanwhile, the victims are hardly ever given a voice. This would be the perfect setting to listen to powerful testimonials, but Fellow Travelers prefers to repeatedly underscore how evil McCarthy is and how his team is formed by hypocrites. We know that already — but more importantly, we have to remember that McCarthy rose to power with ample popular support, and reducing those figures to fiendish figures makes them seem like a thing of the past, while in reality they still exist and would take down our basic human rights in a heartbeat.

The ultimate proof of how insufficiently committed Fellow Travelers is to delving deeper into the backdrop it chose for itself is that, from one episode to another, there’s a time jump — and McCarthy is simply gone. All of a sudden we’re inching closer to the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the '80s , and this time the series doesn’t have much to offer in terms of how badly the community was affected by it and how the stigma impregnated so deep within society that HIV+ individuals still face prejudice today.

All in all, Fellow Travelers is enjoyable enough if you want to follow a romance story without thinking too much about it. It provides enough background so you’ll understand why each character acts the way they do and will make you reflect at least a little on how cruel society has been to our community. However, it prefers to give the spotlight to and downplay the actions of a character that’s problematic at best to the detriment of giving space to other stories — something that an eight-hour series should certainly have room for.

The show romanticizes the toxic relationship between Hawk and Tippy, ignoring the harmful effects it has on Tippy's life.

The premiere episode of Fellow Travelers is now available to stream on Showtime in the U.S., with the remaining seven episodes releasing every week on Friday.

Watch on Showtime

Screen Rant

10 best tv shows like fellow travelers.

With the last episode of Fellow Travelers airing on December 15, 2023, fans of the series have several outstanding and similar options to explore.

Hollywood (2020): A post-WWII setting with diverse characters, focusing on aspiring actors rather than government workers like Fellow Travelers.
Crashing (2016): Short and sweet with great performances, Jonathan Bailey shines in this series about a character developing feelings for a gay man.
It's A Sin (2021): A thoughtful representation of LGBTQ+ characters in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis, similar to Fellow Travelers in its directness and heartfelt portrayal.

With only two episodes left of Fellow Travelers , viewers will likely be looking for something else to watch after the series finale on December 15, 2023. Fellow Travelers is one of the best new shows on Showtime and arguably one of the best historical miniseries of the entire year, thoughtfully bringing Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel of the same name to life. Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey lead an ensemble cast that portrays the hardships of the Lavender Scare and McCarthyism in the early 1950s , as well as a heartbreaking love story between Bomer's Hawk and Bailey's Tim.

Fellow Travelers was adapted for the screen by Ron Nyswaner, the Oscar-nominated writer of Philadelphia (1993) who was also nominated for an Emmy for his work on the celebrated Showtime series Homeland (2011-2020). The miniseries has already been nominated for three 2024 Critics Choice Awards and is likely to make a run at the 2024 Golden Globe and Emmy Awards. For viewers who can't get enough of the limited series Fellow Travelers , there are some other options for television series with similar themes, events, and lead actors.

Lucy's Fellow Travelers Episode 6 Discovery Completely Changes The Meaning Of Hawk's Big Episode 1 Story

10 hollywood (2020).

From the mind of Ryan Murphy, Hollywood shares many similarities with Fellow Travelers in its historical post-World War II setting and its highly sensualized content. Instead of following a group of people working in the federal government as much as Fellow Travelers does, Hollywood focuses on a group of aspiring actors in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles . Hollywood is a great choice for viewers who aren't overly concerned about the historical accuracy of the time period and are looking for diverse and fun characters similar to some of those depicted in Fellow Travelers .

9 Crashing (2016)

Crashing was made by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and was released right around the same time as her critically acclaimed Fleabag in 2016. In true Waller-Bridge style, Crashing is very short at only six episodes but can easily be watched in one sitting . The British series, which originally aired on Channel 4, features a breakout performance from Jonathan Bailey as Sam, who develops strong sexual feelings for a gay character named Fred (Amit Shah). For Bailey fans, Crashing is a must-watch.

8 The Politician

2019 - 2020.

Another series developed by Ryan Murphy, The Politician is also about the inner world of politics and the difficult route to success within a treacherous political landscape. The show, however, initially takes place within the confines of a wealthy Californian high school and is not nearly as entwined in political history as Fellow Travelers is. With that being said, The Politician develops into a raunchy satire as Ben Platt's Payton Hobart matures into a fierce political competitor in Murphy's flashy, sensual, and stylized Netflix series.

7 When We Rise (2017)

On a more series note, When We Rise chronicles a retelling of the gay rights movement in the United States that began with the historical Stonewall uprising in 1969. The four-part miniseries offers a dramatized perspective of the revolutionary events that took place in San Francisco over the latter half of the 20th century. When We Rise will appeal to viewers of Fellow Travelers who are more interested in the historical reenactments of the struggles and hardships of the LGBTQ+ community from the late 1960s to as recently as 2015.

Fellow Travelers Episode 6: Why Tim Really Turned Himself In

6 looking (2014 - 2015).

HBO's Looking presents a much more modern dramatization of the LGBTQ+ community, following a group of contemporary gay best friends in San Francisco. The freedoms and safeties that the main characters of Looking experience are largely possible due to the historical efforts depicted in When We Rise , making it a truly encompassing back-to-back viewing experience. The celebrated Looking stars Jonathan Groff, Frankie J. Alvarez, and Murray Bartlett.

5 American Horror Story: Hotel (2015)

Hulu, prime, fx.

For fans of Matt Bomer specifically, American Horror Story: Hotel is worth the watch if you're anxious to see Bomer in his other memorable roles. Bomer stars alongside Lady Gaga, Wes Bentley, Sarah Paulson, and Evan Peters in the fifth installment of American Horror Story , playing a vampire named Donovan. It's incredibly different from his portrayal of the suave professional Hawk Fuller in Fellow Travelers, who resembles a Don Draper from Mad Men persona. It is, however, one of Bomer's most popular works.

4 White Collar (2009 - 2014)

White Collar is Matt Bomer's claim to fame , having skyrocketed to prominence through his portrayal as a white-collar criminal turned FBI consultant Neal Caffrey. For viewers who are really looking for their Matt Bomer fix, White Collar will certainly provide it, running 81 episodes over the course of six seasons. White Collar ended in 2014 but has recently been in discussion to return in some capacity with Bomer set to reprise his role. While nothing is confirmed, the prospect of a White Collar reboot is very much on the table .

Why Lucy Did THAT To Hawk In Fellow Travelers Episode 6

3 bridgerton (2020 - ).

While White Collar was Matt Bomer's breakthrough TV series, Bridgerton was the show that helped to put Jonathan Bailey on the map. Bailey stars as Lord Anthony Bridgerton, the eldest son of a proud royal family who is intent on finding a satisfactory wife. Bailey's character in Bridgerton is very different from his portrayal of Tim in Fellow Travelers , acting as a quintessential British nobleman who is heterosexual. Similar to Bomer in White Collar , Bailey rose to fame by playing a straight fictional character despite both actors being openly gay.

2 It’s A Sin (2021)

The Max original series It's A Sin may capture some aspects of Fellow Travelers better than any other existing television show. The series follows a group of friends who live in London during the 1980s and are deeply affected by the AIDS crisis. At only five episodes, It's A Sin is a thoughtful representation of gay life during that frightening time period with an empowering message of persistence in the face of grave danger. Like Fellow Travelers , It's A Sin is incredibly direct, honest, and heartfelt in its portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters, making it an absolute must-watch series.

1 Pose (2018 - 2021)

Like Fellow Travelers , Pose has many layers of historical context that present a real-life portrayal of the gay and trans community in the face of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s. Pose is a multifaceted and richly textured series told through the eyes of the LGBTQ+ community in New York City , offering viewers a chance to learn about the actual circumstances of minority groups during that era. Pose is as much of an entertaining series as it is an educational one, making it one of the best shows to watch after Fellow Travelers .

Fellow Travelers

Emmys: Supporting Actor (Limited/TV Movie) — Will Jonathan Bailey Snag His First Nom for ‘Fellow Travelers?’

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys , Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

OSCARS | EMMYS | GRAMMYS | TONYS

2024 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or TV Movie

Commentary (Updated: April 18, 2024) : Jonathan Bailey, acclaimed for his performances as Olly Stevens in “Broadchurch” and Lord Anthony in “Bridgerton,” has landed his most high-profile role to date in Showtime’s “Fellow Travelers.” In his role, Bailey portrays Tim Laughlin, a young congressional staffer entangled in a romantic relationship with a World War II veteran, played by Matt Bomer. Executing an empathetic and poignant portrayal, earned him critical acclaim, including a major win at this year’s Critics Choice Awards, where he surpassed competitors such as Lewis Pullman (“Lessons in Chemistry”) and Taylor Kitsch (“Painkiller”).

Meanwhile, Robert Downey Jr., riding high from his Academy Award win for Christopher Nolan’s best picture winning drama “Oppenheimer,” could be in line to achieve a rare feat. He aims to be the first man, and third person overall, to win both an Emmy and an Oscar acting awards in the same year. In HBO/Max’s satirical black comedy “The Sympathizer,” Downey Jr. showcases his versatility by playing four distinct characters, a performance that positions him as a strong contender for his second Emmy nomination. His first came 23 years ago in supporting comedy actor in the classic “Ally McBeal.”

Also in the realm, FX’s “Shōgun” has been leading the pack as a frontrunner the past few weeks, though its prospects in the acting categories have remained uncertain given the strong competition from many seasoned nominees and winners. Tadanobu Asano is emerging as a standout contender, while his co-stars Takehiro Hira and Yûki Kedôin are also potential inclusions, enhancing the series’ visibility on the awards circuit.

We’re two months from Emmy nomination voting and its already heating up.

Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Primetime Emmy predictions in the major categories.

And the Predicted Nominees Are

Next in Line

Black Mirror. Josh Hartnett as David in Black Mirror. Cr. Nick Wall/Netflix © 2023.

Also in Contention

Eligible performances (supporting actor, limited/tv movie).

"FARGO" -- "Blanket" -- Year 5, Episode 8 (Airs Jan 2) Pictured: Lamorne Morris as Witt Farr. CR: Michelle Faye/FX

**The list below is not complete and have been confirmed as officially submitted. All information is subject to change. Grouped by network that airs each series.

Denis Ménochet — “Monsieur Spade” (AMC)
Jason Isaacs — “The Crowded Room” (Apple TV+)
Noah Jupe — “Franklin” (Apple TV+)
Eddie Marsan — “Franklin” (Apple TV+)
Beau Bridges — “Lessons in Chemistry” (Apple TV+)
Derek Cecil — “Lessons in Chemistry” (Apple TV+)
Lewis Pullman — “Lessons in Chemistry” (Apple TV+)
Anthony Boyle — “Manhunt” (Apple TV+)
Brandon Flynn — “Manhunt” (Apple TV+)
Hamish Linklater — “Manhunt” (Apple TV+)
Patton Oswalt — “Manhunt” (Apple TV+)
Matt Walsh — “Manhunt” (Apple TV+)
Anthony Boyle — “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+)
Ncuti Gatwa — “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+)
Barry Keoghan — “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+)
Nate Mann — “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+)
Henry Lloyd-Hughes — “Archie” (BritBox)
Vincent D’Onofrio — “Echo” (Disney+)
Zahn McClarnon — “Echo” (Disney+)
Chaske Spencer — “Echo” (Disney+)
Kingsley Ben-Adir — “Secret Invasion” (Disney+)
Don Cheadle — “Secret Invasion” (Disney+)
Ben Mendelsohn — “Secret Invasion” (Disney+)
Maaz Ali — “American Horror Story: Delicate” (FX)
Denis O’Hare — “American Horror Story: Delicate” (FX)
Brian J. Smith — “Class of ’09” (FX)
Dave Foley — “Fargo” (FX)
Joe Keery — “Fargo” (FX)
Lamorne Morris — “Fargo” (FX)
David Rysdahl — “Fargo” (FX)
Sam Spruell — “Fargo” (FX)
Joe Mantello — “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” (FX)
Russell Tovey — “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” (FX)
Treat Williams — “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” (FX)
Tom Wilkinson — “The Full Monty” (FX)
Harris Dickinson — “A Murder at the End of the World” (FX)
Clive Owen — “A Murder at the End of the World” (FX)
Tadanobu Asano — “Shōgun” (FX)
Takehiro Hira — “Shōgun” (FX)
Glynn Turman — “Black Cake” (Hulu)
Mandy Patinkin — “Death and Other Details” (Hulu)
Robert DeNiro — “Nada” (Hulu)
Hunter Parrish — “The Other Black Girl” (Hulu)
Will Ferrell — “Quiz Lady” (Hulu)
Jason Schwartzman — “Quiz Lady” (Hulu)
Anoop Desai — “Under the Bridge” (Hulu)
Dali Benssalah — “The Veil” (Hulu)
Josh Charles — “The Veil” (Hulu)
James Purefoy — “The Veil” (Hulu)
Henry Lloyd-Hughes — “We Were the Lucky Ones” (Hulu)
Sam Woolf — “We Were the Lucky Ones” (Hulu)
Curtis Tweedie — “Murdaugh Murders: The Movie – Parts 1 and 2” (Lifetime)
Jharrel Jerome — “Full Circle” (Max)
Timothy Olyphant — “Full Circle” (Max)
Dennis Quaid — “Full Circle” (Max)
Hank Azaria — “The Idol” (Max)
Troye Sivan — “The Idol” (Max)
Hugh Grant — “The Regime” (Max)
Robert Downey Jr. — “The Sympathizer” (Max)
Finn Bennett — “True Detective: Night Country” (Max)
Christopher Eccleston — “True Detective: Night Country” (Max)
John Hawkes — “True Detective: Night Country” (Max)
Lennie James — “Genius: MLK/X” (National Geographic)
Ron Cephas Jones — “Genius: MLK/X” (National Geographic)
Hugh Laurie — “All the Light We Cannot See” (Netflix)
Mark Ruffalo — “All the Light We Cannot See” (Netflix)
Rory Culkin — “Black Mirror” (Netflix)
Josh Hartnett — “Black Mirror” (Netflix)
Simon Baker — “Boy Swallows Universe” (Netflix)
Travis Fimmel — “Boy Swallows Universe” (Netflix)
Anthony LaPaglia — “Boy Swallows Universe” (Netflix)
McKinley Belcher III — “Eric” (Netflix)
Henry Thomas — “Fall of the House of Usher” (Netflix)
Alberto Guerra — “Griselda” (Netflix)
Aml Ameen — “A Man in Full” (Netflix)
Bill Camp — “A Man in Full” (Netflix)
Tom Pelphrey — “A Man in Full” (Netflix)
Taylor Kitsch — “Painkiller” (Netflix)
Johnny Flynn — “Ripley” (Netflix)
Rufus Sewell — “Scoop” (Netflix)
Jason Clarke — “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (Paramount+)
Jake Lacy — “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (Paramount+)
Ismael Cruz Cordova — “Finestkind” (Paramount+)
Tommy Lee Jones — “Finestkind” (Paramount+)
Toby Wallace — “Finestkind” (Paramount+)
Fehinti Balogun — “A Gentleman in Moscow” (Paramount+)
Barry Pepper — “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” (Paramount+)
Dennis Quaid — “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” (Paramount+)
Donald Sutherland — “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” (Paramount+)
Jake Lacy — “Apples Never Fall” (Peacock)
Luke Kirby — “Dr. Death” (Peacock)
Hector Elizondo — “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie” (Peacock)
Jason Gray-Stanford — “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie” (Peacock)
Ted Levine — “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie” (Peacock)
Wood Harris — “Shooting Stars” (Peacock)
Dermot Mulroney — “Shooting Stars” (Peacock)
Harvey Keitel — “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” (Peacock)
Jack Huston — “Expats” (Prime Video)
Brian Tee — “Expats” (Prime Video)
John Cena — “Ricky Stanicky” (Prime Video)
Clifton Collins Jr — “Red, White & Royal Blue” (Prime Video)
Stephen Fry — “Red, White & Royal Blue” (Prime Video)
Wayne Knight — “Them” (Prime Video)
Jelani Alladin — “Fellow Travelers” (Showtime)
Jonathan Bailey — “Fellow Travelers” (Showtime)
Noah J. Ricketts — “Fellow Travelers” (Showtime)
Linus Roache — “Fellow Travelers” (Showtime)
Dermot Mulroney — “Ghosts of Beirut” (Showtime)
Simon Russell Beale — “Mary & George” (Starz)
Tony Curran — “Mary & George” (Starz)

More Information (Supporting Actor, Limited/TV Movie)

2023 category winner : Paul Walter Hauser — “Black Bird” (Apple TV+)

2024 Emmy Awards Calendar and Timeline (all dates are subject to change)

Eligibility period: June 1, 2023 – May 31, 2024
Feb. 29: Submissions open
May 9: Deadline for programs that identify as Primetime programming to upload all entry materials.
June 13: Nominations-round voting begins
June 24: Nominations-round voting ends at 10:00 p.m. PT
June 28 – July 8: Voting for peer group-specific top ten rounds panels (if applicable)
July 17: Primetime Emmy nominations are announced.
July 24: Deadline for errors and omissions to the nominations.
August 5: Find-round videos available for viewing.
August 15: Final-round voting begins.
August 26: Final-round voting ends at 10:00 p.m. PST.
Sept. 7-8: Creative Arts Emmy Awards and Governors Gala
Sunday, Sept. 15: 76th Primetime Emmy Awards to air on ABC.

Emmy Awards Predictions

Other awards predictions, about the primetime emmy awards.

The Primetime Emmy Awards, commonly known as the Emmys, are awarded by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS). Established in 1949, these celebrate outstanding achievements in American primetime television. The Emmys are categorized into three divisions: the Primetime Emmy Awards for performance and production excellence, the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards recognizing achievements in artistry and craftsmanship, and the Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards, which honor significant engineering and technological advancements. The eligibility period typically extends from June 1 to May 31 each year. The Television Academy, which hosts the Emmys, consists of over 20,000 members across 30 professional peer groups, including performers, directors, producers, art directors, artisans and executives.

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Leonardo dicaprio as lex luther zack snyder considered him for ‘batman v superman: dawn of justice’, ‘the chi’ drops new trailer for second half of season six on paramount+ with showtime.

By Lynette Rice

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Created and executive produced by Lena Waithe ( Twenties, Master of None ) under her Hillman Grad banner and executive produced by Common ( Selma ), The Chi centers on a group of residents on the South Side of Chicago who become linked by coincidence but bonded by the need for connection and redemption. It’s produced by 20th Television.

Season six cast includes Jacob Latimore, Alex Hibbert, Yolonda Ross, Shamon Brown Jr., Michael V. Epps, Birgundi Baker, Luke James and Curtiss Cook. Emmy winner Lynn Whitfield, Jill Marie Jones, Kadeem Hardison, Leon, Brett Gray and Daniel J. Watts join fellow season six guest stars Kandi Burruss, La La Anthony, Vic Mensa, Carolyn Michelle Smith, Jason Weaver, Iman Shumpert, Nia Jervier, L’lerrét Jazelle, Hannaha Hall, Ahmad Ferguson, Genesis Denise Hale, Joel Steingold, Judae’a Brown, Miriam A. Hyman, Tyla Abercrumbie, Tai Davis, Rolando Boyce and Tory O. Davis.

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Comic Matt Rife is thriving as a repeat offender

Matt Rife in his 2023 Netflix special, "Natural Selection."

On his latest comedy special, Matt Rife shows off his new tattoo of John Lennon. A simple, quarter-size image of the late singer’s bespectacled face circa 1966, it’s a tribute to Rife’s “Papaw,” the Beatles-loving grandfather who urged him to pursue stand-up comedy.

Rife, who headlines a whopping six shows this weekend at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway (that’s potentially 30,000 tickets), has had a monster year. He released three full hourlong specials, two on his YouTube channel (including “Matthew Steven Rife,” which was dedicated to his grandfather, Steve Rife) followed by his first for Netflix, “Natural Selection.”

He has also attracted ample backlash due to the brash, unsparing nature of his comedy. Much the way that Lennon, his granddad’s idol, was castigated for claiming the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” Rife courts controversy .

“Let’s see who gets offended,” he says at the outset of “Matthew Steven Rife.”

The fact that many of his fans mistake his Lennon tattoo for Harry Potter attests to the median age of Rife’s audience (he’s 28). There are a lot of women at his shows: “I’m realizing right now I need more guy fans,” he says in “Natural Selection.” With an every-day-in-the-gym physique and cheekbones you could set a drink on, he proudly flaunts his appearance.

“Good looking is not good for comedy,” as he says near the beginning of “Only Fans,” his first comedy special, which arrived in 2021.

Rife has been working toward a stand-up career for more than a decade, getting his start at the green age of 15 at the Funny Bone in Columbus, Ohio, about an hour from the rural town where he grew up. Even then, he was ambitious: He reached out to a comedian he admired, Dane Cook, who invited Rife to visit him in Los Angeles after he graduated from high school. Eventually, Rife began traveling with the Arlington native as an opening act.

Comedian Matt Rife at the Funny Bone comedy club in Syracuse, N.Y., in 2023.

Cook recognized a fellow traveler . Just as the older comedian once built a huge, devoted following on the old MySpace platform, he saw Rife taking full advantage of the newer social networking services. Today, Rife has more than 18 million followers on TikTok and more than 7 million on Instagram .

And like Cook before him, Rife has been grappling with detractors who resent his success. Some can’t get past those high cheekbones. Some seem to be put off by his relentless “dude/bro” language, his “y’alls” and his hip-hop slang — none of which sets him apart, particularly, from his male peers.

Mostly, though, it’s the material that gets him into hot water. The same social media universe that has helped make Rife a star has, of course, become an unruly forum for performative outrage and grievance, and his approach to comedy is set up to stir that pot.

“Everyone wants to complain about every joke ever told,” he protests in “Matthew Steven Rife.” Be that as it may, he welcomes the fight. He’s like an all-star-caliber professional athlete who takes motivation from all those unnamed “haters” and “doubters.”

Rife, who has talked openly about struggling with anxiety and depression , has argued against the practice of combing through a public figure’s social media history looking for incriminating posts. People change, he notes: Look at Malcolm X, who served time for burglary, or Maya Angelou, who was once a sex worker. Or Chance the Rapper, who “used to be good.”

In his live act, Rife gleefully dances around every third rail. He has developed extended bits involving wheelchair users, trans people, his Black friends, school shooters, and women of all kinds. Women who consult crystals and star signs and Ouija boards are a recurring theme.

After identifying a burly audience member wearing eyeliner as a gay man at the beginning of one of his specials, Rife says, “Thank you for coming out. Twice.”

He’s undeniably fast on his feet when it comes to crowd work , the audience-interaction portion of his shows, abundant clips of which helped propel him to stardom. Fans seem only too eager to share some of their most intimate stories to see how he responds — almost unerringly, with maximum raunch.

In addition to his three recent comedy specials and his fast-growing touring commitments, Rife found time to star in last year’s independent feature film “Don’t Suck.” Written by Western Massachusetts native Rick D’Elia, it’s the story of a veteran comedian who welcomes an up-and-comer to tour with him. The newcomer — Rife — turns out to be a vampire.

After the heady ascent of the past year, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his most recent special resorts to some hackneyed subjects (airline travel — it’s annoying!) and his emergence as a target for the thought police. Like the guy on his tattoo, it seems, he can’t help but feel persecuted.

“I’m a nice person,” he says. “I never want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

At MGM Music Hall at Fenway. April 19-20, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.; April 21, 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. $49.50-$115. crossroadspresents.com

James Sullivan can be reached at [email protected] .

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Daytime Emmys 2024: Nominees Announced for Best Soap, 4 Other Categories

Matt webb mitovich, chief content officer.

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The first few nominations for the 51st annual Daytime Emmy Awards were announced on Thursday afternoon/evening (via the assorted infotainment shows), with the contenders in scores of other categories due to be revealed this Friday at noon ET.

The first five categories to announce their nominees are Outstanding Daytime Drama Series, plus Lead Actress and Lead Actor, and Outstanding Daytime Talk Series and Outstanding Daytime Talk Show Host.

This year’s Daytime Emmys ceremony will be held at the Westin Bonaventure Los Angeles on Friday, June 7 starting at 8/7c and air on CBS . The awards show will also be available to stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.

DAYTIME DRAMA SERIES

The Bay , Popstar! TV The Bold and the Beautiful , CBS Days of our Lives , Peacock General Hospital , ABC Neighbours , Freevee The Young and the Restless , CBS

LEAD ACTRESS IN A DAYTIME DRAMA

Katherine Kelly Lang (Brooke, The Bold and the Beautiful ) Annika Noelle, (Hope, The Bold and the Beautiful ) Michelle Stafford (Phyllis, The Young and the Restless ) Tamara Braun (Ava, Days of Our Lives ) Finola Hughes (Anna, General Hospital ) Cynthia Watros (Nina, General Hospital )

LEAD ACTOR IN A DAYTIME DRAMA

Eric Braeden (Victor, The Young and the Restless ) Scott Clifton (Liam, The Bold and the Beautiful ) Thorsten Kaye (Ridge, The Bold and the Beautiful ) John McCook (Eric, The Bold and the Beautiful ) Eric Martsolf (Brady, Days of Our Lives )

SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DAYTIME DRAMA

Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DAYTIME DRAMA

Daytime talk series.

The Jennifer Hudson Show (syndicated) The Kelly Clarkson Show (syndicated) Tamron Hall (syndicated) Turning the Tables With Robin Roberts , Disney+ The View , ABC

GUEST PERFORMANCE IN A DAYTIME DRAMA

Writing for a daytime drama, directing for a daytime drama, daytime talk show host.

Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin and Ana Navarro, The View Kelly Clarkson, The Kelly Clarkson Show Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa, Live With Kelly and Mark Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Natalie Morales, Jerry O’Connell and Sheryl Underwood, The Talk Tamron Hall, Tamron Hall

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS SERIES

Legal/courtroom program, culinary series, culinary host, select other categories:.

ORIGINAL SONG Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

COSTUME DESIGN/STYLING Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

HAIRSTYLING AND MAKEUP Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

LIGHTING DIRECTION Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

CASTING Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

TRAVEL, ADVENTURE AND NATURE PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

INSTRUCTIONAL/HOW-TO PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

LIFESTYLE PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

ARTS AND POPULAR CULTURE PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

EDUCATIONAL AND INFORMATIONAL PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

DAYTIME SPECIAL Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

SHORT FORM PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

WRITING TEAM FOR A DAYTIME NON-FICTION PROGRAM Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

OUTSTANDING MUSIC DIRECTION AND COMPOSITION Nominees to come Friday at noon ET!

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16 comments.

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EM for Days, really?? Congrats to him but I just think Brady is such a one note wonder. There are others who deserved a nom.

Congrats to Eric Braden on his nomination he controls the Newman’s and the clan better than anyone.

Cynthia Watros – the most hated actress on GH – was nominated, but not Laura Wright or Maura West???!!! You’ve got to be kidding me!!! Talk about over acting! She’s terrible! How is she nominated!! Happy for Finola, though. She actually deserves it!

Billion percent agree!

I would laugh myself silly if Watros were to win, given how the previous writing regime seemed determined to make Nina into the town punching bag/pariah and write Carly as their untouchable heroine deserving of the town’s praise and admiration. The unbalanced writing of their “Granny Wars” made me only root for Nina more, which I KNOW was not their intention, and if Watros were to win for her performances in stories purposely written to make viewers hate her character…well, it’s a delicious irony.

Don’t you mean most hated character? Cynthia Wartros is an actress doing the job she’s paid to do. Nina sucking as a character is 💯% on the writers and exec producer.

I would hope people are hating the character and not the actress!

I doubt I will watch the Gates. I was hoping for a continuation of Guiding Light or As The World Turns. Even nighttime soaps such as Melrose Place, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest Edge of nite or alot of the others. Also.it would be nice to see the Soap that Vincent Irrazary is on …on Broadcast TV instead of streaming!

Where is Ari Zucker??? Her work as Nicole Walker in the still unresolved stolen baby storyline was magnificent!! Was she precluded from being nominated because she’s suing Days of Our Lives??😖😖😖

Watros is my pick

Oh, please no!!!!!!!!!!

I am so excited for Kelly and Matk. They are so awesome!!

“The View”….nominated??? LOL

The options are obviously very limited!

FYI, since its debut—The View has won 31 Emmy Awards.

I am shaking my head. Anyone who actually watched Melody Thomas Scott’s reel would have at the very least secured her nomination for Best Actress. It was hers to lose. Why are there multiple nominations from some soaps while others struggle to get one? This system needs a serious readjustment. Ms. Scott you were robbed this year.

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ICE SPICE's First LP

From debuts to do-overs, what it means to start an artistic life — at any age

Letter From the Editor

A cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine's April 21, 2024 Culture issue, with the heading "Beginners. From debuts to do-overs, what it means to start an artistic life — at any age." On the cover is Ice Spice, with orange hair, wearing a black ruched top with one shoulder strap and a crucifix necklace.

Clockwise from top left: Ice Spice, Sky Lakota-Lynch, Meg Stalter, Tyla, Sarah Pidgeon and Titus Kaphar.

T’s Culture issue looks at artistic beginnings in all their forms.

By Hanya Yanagihara

The First Stroke

A painting of a nude woman turning away from two men who are leaning over a balcony, with one whispering in the other's ear.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Susanna and the Elders” (1610).

Why, even as they progress in their practices, all artists remain perpetual beginners.

By Aatish Taseer

David Kershenbaum, wearing an open shirt and sunglasses, sits next to Tracy Chapman, wearing a jean jacket, in front of a control board in a recording studio.

Tracy Chapman (right).

Lester Cohen/Getty Images

Musicians, writers and others on the work that started it all for them — and on what, if anything, they’d change about it now.

Interviews by Lovia Gyarkye and Nicole Acheampong

When These Two First Worked Together

Marc Jacobs and Cindy Sherman.

Love, spats, splits and enduring affinity: creative partnerships that have stood the test of time.

Interviews by Ella Riley-Adams, Nick Haramis, Nicole Acheampong, Julia Halperin and Coco Romack

Begin Again

Jordi Roca.

Video by Anna Bosch Miralpeix

What it’s like to make new art after many years or amid new challenges — or to change careers completely.

Interviews by Michael Snyder, M.H. Miller and Emily Lordi

When the Beginning Is Also the End

Miguel Adrover.

Catarina Osório de Castro

People who found great creative success in one field — before life took them in a totally different direction.

By John Wogan and M.H. Miller

J u v e n i l i a

Do Ho Suh’s “Tiger Mask” (1971).

Courtesy of the artist © Do Ho Suh

What artists see when they look back at work they made in their youth.

Interviews by Julia Halperin, Kate Guadagnino and Juan A. Ramírez

A first album, a first restaurant, a first time on Broadway: Ten debuts happening right now.

Interviews by Juan A. Ramírez and Emily Lordi

How It Begins

Jenny Holzer.

Photographs by Nicholas Calcott

The very first steps, whether you’re an actor getting into character or an artist presenting the survey of your life’s work.

Interviews by Laura May Todd

The Beginners’ Hall of Fame

A floral painting against a purple background.

Tabboo!’s “Lavender Garden” (2023).

Courtesy of the artist, Karma and Gordon Robichaux

Six people who found a new creative calling later in life — or for whom recognition was long overdue.

By Jason Chen

Advice on Beginning

Kim Gordon.

Laura Levine/Corbis, via Getty Images

Ten creative minds on how to start, pivot and productively procrastinate.

Interviews by Kate Guadagnino

Courtesy of Joseph Dirand Architecture

We asked 80 artists and other creative people to tell us what they’re starting right now or hope to start very soon.

T’s Culture Issue: Beginners.

An exploration of artistic beginnings in all their forms.

There’s a reason all of us — magazine editors in particular, perhaps, but not only us — love an artistic debut. It’s not just that those releasing their first album, book or movie, or having their first gallery exhibit or Broadway show, are usually young; it’s that they embody that most delicious and evanescent of qualities: promise. Any painter could be the next Rothko or Basquiat; any singer could be the next Joni or Aretha. There the new artist sits, poised between our expectations and their unwritten reality. Becoming emotionally invested in an untested creative life is like becoming financially invested in an exciting new company — should they (or it) work, the reward is not just theirs but ours. “See?” we tell ourselves. “We knew it all along.”

But the real test of being an artist isn’t the first album, book, movie or Broadway show, as significant as those accomplishments are. It’s what happens after. All artists know that living a true creative life means facing an endless series of beginnings: It’s starting over after setbacks; it’s pushing forward through doubt and despair; it’s trying again when someone tells you no; it’s slogging ahead when no one seems to like or care about what you make; it’s ignoring the voice inside you that tells you to stop; it’s striving and failing, again and again and again. There is no point of complete security, no award or recognition that bestows total confidence — a life in art means that, to some degree, you’re starting anew every day. As the novelist Andrew Holleran tells T, “Writing is basically unconscious, and you don’t get any smarter about it. Imagine a brain surgeon who didn’t learn from each operation? We’d be horrified. But when you sit down to write, you’re always wondering how to do it.”

On the covers, clockwise from top left: ICE SPICE wears a Burberry dress, $2,290, burberry.com ; Graff necklace, price on request, graff.com ; and her own earrings and ring. Photographed by Shikeith. Styled by Ian Bradley. Makeup by Karina Milan at the Wall Group. SKY LAKOTA-LYNCH wears a Canali coat, $3,060, canali.com ; and a Bode jacket, $1,080, bode.com . Photographed by Shikeith. Styled by Delphine Danhier. Hair by Tsuki at Streeters. Makeup by Jamal Scott for YSL Beauty. MEG STALTER . Photographed by Shikeith. Styled by Delphine Danhier. Hair by Tiago Goya at Home Agency using Oribe. Makeup by Holly Silius at R3-MGMT. TYLA wears a Ferragamo top, $1,190, and earrings, $730, ferragamo.com . Photographed by Shikeith. Styled by Sasha Kelly. Hair by Christina “Tina” Trammell. Makeup by Jamal Scott for YSL Beauty. SARAH PIDGEON wears a Gucci dress, $24,500, gucci.com . Photographed by Shikeith. Styled by Delphine Danhier. Hair by Tsuki at Streeters. Makeup by Jamal Scott for YSL Beauty. TITUS KAPHAR wears a Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello coat, $4,900, ysl.com . Photographed by Shikeith. Styled by Delphine Danhier. Hair by Tsuki at Streeters. Makeup by Jamal Scott for YSL Beauty.

In this issue, we look at what it means for an artist to begin, from actual debuts (such as Sky Lakota-Lynch, one of our cover stars, who’s appearing this spring in “The Outsiders,” his first original Broadway role) to do-overs (such as Jon Bon Jovi, about to embark on tour after throat surgery and a 40-year career, or the cabaret performer turned visual artist Justin Vivian Bond). And though the artists who appear in these pages are all different, they share a spirit of generosity: It’s no easy thing to give voice to your dreams and insecurities, much less to do so publicly. Their collective perseverance — a mix of dogged determination and wild hope — is a reminder for all of us that a creative life, that all life, takes nerve. It takes humility. It takes a kind of arrogance that sees you through the most barren periods.

And by the way: You don’t need to be young to lead a creative life. All you have to do is start. Start — and then never stop.

On March 12, as we were readying this issue to go to press, one of our colleagues, Carter Love, T’s senior photography editor, died. He was 41.

Being a good photo editor demands taste and a sense of coordination. For a fashion or celebrity shoot, they, along with the creative director and style director, assemble teams: the photographer, of course, but also the stylist, models, hair and makeup artists and set designers. For a travel story, the photo editor selects and hires the fixer, the photographer, the location scout, the translator and the transportation. Once on set, a photo editor stays until the very end of the shoot, even if the shoot goes all day. Carter worked on these — and many other — kinds of stories, often simultaneously; in this issue alone, he produced a dozen images, from the portrait of the longtime collaborators Cindy Sherman and Marc Jacobs to the picture of the fashion designer turned photographer Miguel Adrover.

Along with his native senses of taste and coordination, Carter was — crucially — able to laugh at the absurdities, the unexpected little (and not-so-little) disasters that inevitably arise during a shoot, no matter how thorough the planning: rain on a day when sun was predicted; equipment stuck in customs; a subject’s last-minute cancellation. He had a big laugh, resonant and full, which everyone in the office could hear; at work parties, he sometimes broke into song. In addition to his big laugh, he had a big voice. He was tall and wiry and quick moving, with magnificent red hair — I’d often look up from my desk and see his head and torso streaking across the top of the cubicle walls, hurrying off somewhere.

One of Carter’s most used phrases was “absolutely.” Could I see more options from this shoot? “Absolutely.” Could I have a list of the talent that had already confirmed? “Absolutely.” Thanks, Carter, for this new information. “Absolutely.”

Barely a week after his death, that word keeps beating in my head. Will we always ask ourselves why he had to die? Absolutely. Were we lucky to work with him? Absolutely. Will we miss him? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Digital production and design: Danny DeBelius, Amy Fang, Chris Littlewood, Coco Romack, Carla Valdivia Nakatani and Jamie Sims.

ONE EVENING 17 years ago, V.S. Naipaul came to dinner at my flat in Delhi. The writer, who had become something of a mentor to me, was transfixed by a painting I had bought a few years before. It was a self-portrait, over 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide. “I find it hypnotic,” Naipaul said, filing away spoonfuls of yellow dal. Observing the beauty of the hand clasped (as if in horror) over the mouth, the thumb livid against the dark hollows of the eyes, he added of the artist, “This is someone who has really seen, who has gone back again and again to see.”

Listen to this article, read by Neil Shah

I was at the beginning of my writing career, using my first advances to collect a few works of art. It was thrilling to have someone with as discerning an eye as Naipaul’s — “the brilliant noticer,” in the words of the literary critic James Wood — approve of “How Did You Sleep?” (2002), but it also made me sad. Its creator, Zack, who’d been a close friend at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the late 1990s, had recently given up painting, and “How Did You Sleep?” had become a symbol to me of the precarity of what it means to get started as an artist.

The Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi was 17 in 1610 when she painted “Susanna and the Elders” (above). She went on to be the 17th century’s most accomplished female painter.

Zack, now 43, was of a mixed-race background from Topeka, Kan. After struggling with feelings of inferiority in our first year related to his public school education, he taught himself to paint from scratch. I would visit him and watch as he, dressed in paint-stained khakis and New Balance sneakers, toiled away at the self-portraits that were his trademark. He was a model to me of artistic labor and discipline, even if those early paintings were painfully amateurish.

Then, in our last semester, having been abroad a while, I entered Fayerweather Hall for the art department’s end-of-year show and saw “How Did You Sleep?” I was dumbstruck. I’m not sure I would’ve even been able to recognize it as Zack’s work — so prodigious had been his development as a painter — if it hadn’t been a self-portrait. Painted in the wake of 9/11, it showed the artist in a blue shirt with an expression of prophetic terror, as if watching a disaster foretold. I remember wanting to own it because it was proof, like none I had ever had before, that there really did exist such a thing in the world as raw talent. I persuaded Zack to sell it to me. The painting followed me from Amherst to my first job in New York, and on to London and Delhi.

By the time Naipaul saw it, Zack was working in strategic and financial communications in New York and no longer painting — “Every notary bears within him the debris of a poet,” Gustave Flaubert tells us. “My new job is intense,” Zack had written to say. “It’ll be good for a few years, but it’s not a career.” But neither was art; and Zack, who works as a researcher at Google now, was my first fearful example of how that mythical thing we call talent is real, and how talent alone isn’t enough.

IT WASN’T MY intention to start an essay about artistic beginnings with a story of artistic death. I love those romantic tales of creative daring and breakthrough: the English travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin quitting his job at The Sunday Times of London’s magazine with a simple telegram that read, “Have gone to Patagonia”; or, more dramatically, Paul Gauguin abandoning his wife, kids and job as a salesman to pursue his dream of being a painter. I love the improbability of the lives that could not have been: Salman Rushdie, the adman; W. Somerset Maugham, the doctor; the director Kathryn Bigelow, renovating dilapidated apartments in New York with the then-obscure composer Philip Glass. I remember Arundhati Roy teaching my mother and aunt aerobics in the basement of the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi before going on to win the Booker Prize for her debut novel, “The God of Small Things” (1997). It’s exhilarating to see destiny pick those who could but only have been artists out of the mundanity of their lives and light the way to a life of vocation.

I’m especially moved by those first moments of validation by which an artist comes out to himself, as it were. Consider Joseph Conrad in his mid-30s, working aboard the ship Torrens, with the manuscript of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly” (1895). It had acquired, he writes in “A Personal Record” (1912), “a faded look and an ancient, yellowish complexion.” At sea, Conrad met his first reader, Jacques, a “young Cambridge man.” “Well, what do you say?” Conrad, brimming with anxiety, asked his new friend. “Is it worth finishing?” “ ‘Distinctly,’ he answered, in his sedate, veiled voice,” Conrad recalls years later, “and then coughed a little.” With that one word, Jacques, who was soon to be carried away by a fatal cold, had given a seafaring Polish exile a vital nod of encouragement. “The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final ‘Distinctly,’” writes Conrad, one of literature’s late bloomers (he was 38 when he published his first novel), “remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity.”

This quiet admission to oneself, as sacred as the vows of priesthood, of wanting to undertake the creative life is a necessary step; but like talent, it’s not enough. To be an artist is not a private act but a public one. No artist is born into a vacuum, or later speaks into one. They are as much a product of the society they emerge from as a response to it. Nor is artistic expression all spirit, all feeling. As Naipaul has frequently noted, writers require a complex edifice of interlocking parts — an infrastructure, if you will — to thrive. More broadly speaking, all successful artists rely on a network of critics, journals and newspapers, a discerning audience, bookshops and concert halls and galleries — which is generations in the making, presupposing certain values, certain economic and political realities. The Ukrainian-born novelist Clarice Lispector came of age in the Brazil of the 1920s. At 13, she “consciously claimed the desire to write,” as her biographer Benjamin Moser quotes her in “Why This World” (2009), but no sooner had she claimed her destiny than she felt herself in a void. The idea of vocation had been instilled in her, but that didn’t mean she knew how to proceed. “Writing was always difficult for me,” Lispector once wrote, “even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”

Lispector had both vocation and talent, but what makes any artist’s first steps so tentative is that the path forward is narrower than we imagine. We come into the world believing we can be a great many things (and for a great many this is true) but, for those destined to be artists, the creative choices they make are almost as limited as the choice of being an artist itself. Maugham wanted to demystify the impulse that had him give up medicine to answer his calling as a novelist. “I am a writer as I might have been a doctor or a lawyer,” he writes in “The Summing Up,” his 1938 literary memoir, but, soon after that, despite himself, Maugham stumbles on that aspect of the artistic life that eludes banalization, for it’s truly mysterious — namely, the bond between the artist and his subject. “Though the whole world,” writes Maugham, “with everyone in it and all its sights and events, is your material, you yourself can only deal with what corresponds to some secret spring in your own nature.”

A painting of a skull next to an hourglass with flowers, butterflies and bubbles around it.

“Vanitas Still Life” (circa 1665-70) by Jan van Kessel the Elder, who was from a long line of celebrated Flemish painters — Pieter Bruegel the Elder was his great-grandfather — and was perhaps destined to be an artist.

It’s this, the inexorability of the correspondence between an artist and the world, that gives those first steps their magical quality. It represents a rebirth so profound that it can often entail the killing off of a former self. One of my literary heroes, the writer Rebecca West — the author of that magisterial work of travel, inquiry and sympathy “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia” (1940) — was abandoned (as I was) by her father as a child. In late Victorian England, it left her with an exaggerated regard for what were seen as male qualities, as well as the need to compensate for their absence. “Men, she felt,” writes J.R. Hammond in “H.G. Wells and Rebecca West” (1991), his biography of their romantic and literary relationship, “should be strong and dependable; deep inside herself she sensed they were not to be trusted.” These gendered dynamics were surely at work as West, first making her way in the world at age 20, sloughed off the softer given name of Cissie Fairfield to adopt, as a pseudonym, the name of the spirited protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play “Rosmersholm” (1886).

No artist is without this set of special circumstances. They are the ground from which the need for expression arises. The path forward comes upon the artist-in-waiting with the power of certain mathematical proofs, elegant, inevitable, at once simple and inscrutable. “Falling in love for the first time and getting started as a writer,” my friend the writer Karan Mahajan, 39, the author of the novels “Family Planning” (2008) and “The Association of Small Bombs” (2016), replied by email when I asked him what it had been like for him, “both things happened at once for me. Suddenly, I had my material, and it encompassed all aspects of my life: my childhood in Delhi; immigration to the United States as a student; a future decided by plane journeys. I could love myself as the other loved me.”

For the Pakistani-born American painter Salman Toor, 40, the moment when, he says, “something vital clicked into place” meant that he suddenly found himself in “a direct relationship” between the things he was thinking and talking about every day and the paintings he was at work on. “In 2016,” he says, “I did a few paintings out of a need to be completely honest with myself. I wanted to illustrate the stories I was bursting to tell. A lot of these stories were about coming out and showing the excitement, anxieties and challenges of belonging to multiple cultures and living a cute little life in the East Village.”

The date surprised me. I had been aware of Toor’s work for almost a decade before this moment. To me, he was the painter of a certain kind of South Asian disquiet. No one captured the massive cultural and economic disparities of my life in Delhi (and his in Lahore) like Toor. Upon scenes of revelry and privilege — a party, a picnic, a rich westernized couple frolicking out of doors with a glass of wine and an iPhone — he would, in the form of servants in the background looking on, introduce an element of unease that hinted at the fragility of the societies we lived in. But quite unbeknown to me, Toor’s life in New York had opened up a new vein of material. To put it another way, he had begun again. And this is what we tend to forget: In the careers of certain artists, those who make big, varied bodies of work in which different strands of their experience are subsumed, the business of beginning, and beginning again, never ceases. Each new beginning brings with it all the uncertainty and blankness of the first. Experience might protect such an artist from forcing what’s clearly not working, but that core anxiety of not knowing if one will create again always remains. “Do not worry,” Hemingway would console himself, “you have always written before and you will write now.”

WHAT CONSTITUTES A beginning? In the common conception, it’s the first book, the first album, the first show at a major gallery. Yet an artist has myriad private ways in which they mark moments of true breakthrough. My childhood friend the sitarist and composer Anoushka Shankar, 42, regards her fourth album as her first. She had grown up under the influence of her mighty father, Ravi Shankar, the man credited with having introduced Indian classical music to the West. Every artist struggles with what the literary critic Harold Bloom has called the anxiety of influence but, in Anoushka’s case, it was even more pronounced. As she told me, Ravi Shankar was “my guru, my teacher, my father.” It was he who had composed her first three albums.

Ravi, before he went on to become the greatest sitarist of his generation, had been part of a dance troupe led by his brother Uday, which caused a sensation in the Europe and America of the 1930s. “Hindu thought, alive, authentic, in flesh and bone, in sound, gesture and spirit,” is how the French mystic René Daumal describes the Shankar troupe in his book “Rasa” (1982), but Ravi was conflicted. He eventually broke with the troupe and dedicated himself entirely to the sitar. “He had a real directional shift that I didn’t have,” Anoushka says. Her beginnings, though she was six decades younger than her father, were in a sense more traditional. They entailed the surprise of finding newness within tradition. “I think my journey,” she says, “was more progressively finding how the thing that was in front of me — the sitar, namely — the thing that had been given to me, could be my outlet, could be my voice.”

A coda to this intergenerational tale of artistic beginnings is the story of Anoushka’s half sister, Norah Jones, who spent years of her childhood estranged from her father and grew up in Texas with her American mother. At a time when both Anoushka and I were discovering our half siblings, I remember going to see Norah play at little-known clubs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She was staking claim to what felt like a genetic destiny in music, though in a tradition entirely different from that of her father and sister. I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed beginnings as meager and transformational as these for, not long after, Norah’s debut album, “Come Away With Me” (2002), was released; it went on to win five Grammys, sell 30 million copies and all but save the piracy-shattered music industry.

We live in a society that prizes the individual above all else but, in the art of premodern Europe and classical India, to begin as an artist didn’t necessarily entail breaking with tradition, nor was it given to every artist to be original. “Raphael was adept at this,” writes Rachel Cusk in her travel memoir “The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy” (2009), in which she describes the Italian Renaissance painter’s relationship to his first guru, Perugino. Raphael had become so good at imitating Perugino, Cusk tells us, that the copies of his master’s work were indistinguishable from the originals. The art of pastiche, of inhaling the influence of an older admired artist so completely that it enters your soul, exists today, too. The South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s early works owe a huge debt to Samuel Beckett, as Rushdie’s do to Gabriel García Márquez and Thomas Pynchon’s to James Joyce. The difference in the modern era is that influence is something we must shrug off in order to become our own people, yet not everyone can. Cusk deals very movingly with Raphael’s quest (and ultimate failure) to be his own man. In a field crowded with giants such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he “retreated behind the mask of humility, never to come out again.” But far from this being his downfall as an artist, it, too, was a kind of beginning. “In the end,” writes Cusk, “his borrowing of such greatness amounted to greatness itself. Not everyone who sees a Michelangelo can go off and paint a Michelangelo.”

THERE ARE SO many ways to begin. I said it wasn’t my intention to open with a story of artistic death, but I never explained why I did. The reason is that after six books, and 20 years after writing my first publishable sentences, stamina, endurance and the ability to stay the course have come to mean at least as much to me as that first raw efflorescence of talent. If Zack’s story acquired the force of parable for me, it was because it showed me the vanity of our preoccupation with talent. Many with fewer gifts who are yet more steadfast go on to have brilliant careers as artists. There’s an undeniable mystery in why some among us become artists, but there’s a greater mystery to me still in those who survive the vicissitudes of creative life, leaving behind bodies of work through which there runs an arc of growth as sublime as the vaulting of a Gothic cathedral.

A true artist always brings something new into the world. A new color, a new complexion, a new way of looking — a “new kind of beauty,” to use Marcel Proust’s phrase for the special distinctiveness he felt that Fyodor Dostoyevsky had brought to literature. We make the mistake of thinking of that newness as an externality, a scaffolding, a mere matter of style. But in fact, the originality we detect on the surface is an emanation from the birth of a new idea. It’s something far more radical, far more unnerving, than we are prepared to accept. Real artists bring about real rupture. We want to domesticate the discomfort that makes us feel but, deep down, we know the old rules no longer apply; and for one fleeting moment, our world, with us in it, is laid bare, transfigured by the imagination of someone who has dared to see it anew.

Read by Neil Shah. Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck. Engineered by Quinton Kamara

Amy Tan , 72, writer, on “The Joy Luck Club” (1989)

Amy Tan holds Daisy Tan's right elbow with her left hand. They are walking down the a sidewalk and smiling.

Tan with her mother, Daisy Tan, in San Francisco in 1989. The author’s 11th book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” a collection of illustrated essays, is out this month.

Robert Foothorap

I was a business writer [of marketing materials for companies and brochures for their employees] in the mid-1980s and, even though I was successful, I was unhappy. I wasn’t doing anything meaningful. Writing fiction allowed me, through subterfuge, to access emotional realms that I hadn’t explored before. When you write your first novel, you tend to include a lot of autobiographical elements. “The Joy Luck Club” [about the lives of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters] became deeply personal without my knowing it. I wasn’t consciously writing about racism or generational divides, even though that’s exactly what I was writing about. At that time [Tan was 37 when the book came out], I was just trying to find a story.

A cover of the book "The Joy Luck Club" with illustrations of dragons and a mirrored cloud-like pattern.

People got all kinds of things out of it. They said it saved their marriage or helped their relationships. I felt wonderful about that, but I couldn’t take credit. I didn’t intend to write a book that was going to improve people’s lives. That would’ve been a noble pursuit but, to do that, I’d have had to come up with a book that was very different — less spontaneous and honest. Without a doubt, what made me proudest was that my mother read it. She wasn’t proficient in English, but she understood it more than anybody else. — L.G.

Avril Lavigne , 39, musician, on “Let Go” (2002)

Avril Lavigne sits cross-legged on an office chair wearing headphones with a microphone in front of her face.

Lavigne at a recording studio in Cologne, Germany, in 2002. The musician’s new tour, “Avril Lavigne: The Greatest Hits,” begins next month.

Fryderyk Gabowicz/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

I remember going into the studio and people trying to tell me what to do or how my music should be, but I knew what I wanted to create. “Let Go” reflects how I felt as a young girl coming into the music industry. I was 15 when I got signed and 16 when I made that album. I had all this angst and rebellion, and I wanted to be expressive in that tone. But the adults around me kept delivering cheesy song ideas, and I wasn’t feeling the way people were playing the guitar. It was all too light and fluffy; that’s the stuff that made me run.

The cover for Avril Lavigne's Let Go album, with the text in a scratched font, and a blurred cover image of Lavigne, wearing all navy, with her arms crossed, standing on the street.

Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment and Avril Lavigne

When I went to Los Angeles and connected with [the album’s co-writers Lauren Christy, Graham Edwards and Scott Spock of] the Matrix and Clif Magness, they were way cooler and more open-minded. Lauren and I spent a lot of time together. I sat with her in the backyard on a picnic blanket writing “Complicated”; we really connected. I was finally understood. The production was a little poppy for me. If I had to redo the album today, I’d tweak some things here and there production-wise and apply some of my experience from the past 20 years. Still, the important songs like “Sk8er Boi” and “Complicated” rocked enough — they had the live guitar and drums — and “I’m With You” wasn’t too polished. On songs like “Unwanted” and “Losing Grip,” we really went all the way — no holding back. — L.G.

Chloë Sevigny , 49, actress, on “Kids” (1995)

Chloë Sevigny turns to face the camera. Behind her are various theme park attractions, including a ferris wheel and a carousel.

Sevigny at the Jersey Shore in 1995. The actress, who has appeared in over 50 features, recently shot “Bonjour Tristesse,” an upcoming adaptation of the 1954 Françoise Sagan novel.

From left: Lila Lee-Morrison; © Shining Excalibur Pictures/courtesy of Everett Collection

A poster for the movie "Kids", showing the letters K-I-D-S overlaid over four portraits of actors in, respectively, red, blue, green and yellow.

I still find the marketing around “Kids” [about a day in the life of some wayward New York City teenagers] a little outrageous: “The most shocking film of the year!” “A must-see!” But it worked. A lot of us making it thought of it as a cautionary tale, but so many kids have come up to me and said, “That’s why I moved to New York. I wanted to live that life.” I was an amateur [at 19, when I made the film]. I knew the cinematographer, Eric Alan Edwards. He’d shot [Gus Van Sant’s 1991 movie] “My Own Private Idaho,” and I thought the acting in that was impeccable. I trusted that if something [in my performance] was false, he’d say something. I don’t know why, but I just gave myself over to [Edwards and the director, Larry Clark]; I trusted that they wanted to get to the truth of things.

The hardest scene for me to shoot was when [my character, 15-year-old Jennie] is at the clinic receiving information that she’d contracted H.I.V. I thought, “How does one even begin to try to act that?” I was very tentative. If I were to approach that scene now, I think I’d have the confidence to try more things — one take crying, others doing this and that. At the time, I was trying to be as real as I thought I could be on camera with a crew around me.

I’m surprised that “Kids” is still making such an impact, but I’m also not. Afterward, I thought, “OK, this set a bar. These are the kinds of people I want to work with.” — N.A.

A photo of five people posing for a photograph. Stephen King wears a green shirt and a jacket and holds a baby who is drinking from a bottle.

King, the author of over 70 books, with his wife, Tabitha, and their children (from left) Joe, Owen and Naomi at their house in Orrington, Maine, in 1979. His next book, a short-story collection titled “You Like It Darker,” will be published in May.

James Leonard

Stephen King , 76, writer, on “Carrie” (1974)

One of my rules about writing is similar to a rule in [the card game] Hearts: If it’s laid, it’s played. I have a tendency not to go back and reread things, particularly with “Carrie” [a horror novel about a bullied high school student capable of telekinesis]. I’m afraid of how naïve it may be, how much it might be the work of a very young writer. It’s like when you’re a kid and you don’t know how to behave. You look back on certain things and say, “I shouldn’t have grabbed that,” or, “That wasn’t polite.” I don’t want to go back and see that my shirttail was untucked or my fly was unzipped.

The cover of a book, with the title "Carrie: a novel of a girl with a frightening power." The cover image shows half a portrait of a woman with an embroidered jacket and brown hair blowing in the air.

Courtesy of Doubleday. Photo by Joshua Scott

I’d change a lot. It would have a little more depth when it came to the characters. Remember, it started as a short story. I had this idea about a girl with paranormal powers who was going to get revenge on the girls who made fun of her. It was too long for the markets that I had in mind, and I didn’t know very much about girls anyway, particularly girls’ gym classes and locker rooms, so I threw the story away. My wife fished it out of the trash, uncrumpled the pages, looked at it and said, “This is pretty good. I’ll help you.” It’s a very short book, way under 300 pages. Also, there are pejoratives that were common then that I wouldn’t use now, even though they’re realistic and come out of the mouths of characters we don’t like. On the whole, I must’ve done a fairly good job because the book was published [when I was 26] and [in 1976] they made a movie out of it.

One of the things I think about a lot was that my mother got to read it. She had cancer at that point and died before any of my other books were published. Because of “Carrie,” I had a chance to take care of her and get her in a hospice. By then we had the money, otherwise we would’ve been out of luck. — L.G.

A man with a mustache and short brown hair stands amid brown reeds.

Holleran in Florida in the 1980s. Three of the author’s five novels, including “Dancer From the Dance,” were republished in paperback this past December.

From left: Lee Calvin Yeomans, courtesy of Andrew Holleran; Ian Dickson/Shutterstock

Ian Dickson/Shutterstock

Andrew Holleran , 79, writer, on “Dancer From the Dance” (1978)

“Dancer” has had a life of its own, which I could’ve never predicted. I wrote the book at my parents’ house in Florida one winter [when I was 33]. It was going to be the last book I ever wrote, because I’d been writing for 10 years after graduating from an M.F.A. program and had only had one story published in a magazine. I said to myself, “You have to stop now and go to law school.” Luckily, the book came out of me very quickly and, in retrospect, became a description of six years I’d spent in New York. It was very easy because I’d obviously touched something that mattered to me.

I’ve never reread “Dancer” [about gay life in 1970s New York] so, while I’m sure that if I did, I’d revise, revise, revise, I can’t imagine changing any of it. The campy style of the letters that frame the book is probably outdated, which is a shame since I love camp.

I’ve learned since then that writing is basically unconscious, and you don’t get any smarter about it. Imagine a brain surgeon who didn’t learn from each operation? We’d be horrified. But when you sit down to write, you’re always wondering how to do it. — L.G.

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein stand on a staircase with a curved bannister and portraits hanging on wooden walls.

Harry and Stein, of the rock band Blondie, in the U.K. in 1977. Stein’s memoir, “Under a Rock,” will be published in June.

From left: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy Stock Photo; CBW/Alamy Stock Photo

The cover of the album Blondie, with the title in capital letters and italicized. It shows five people dressed in black tops and jackets standing in front of each other.

CBW/Alamy Stock Photo

Debbie Harry , 78, and Chris Stein , 74, musicians, on “Blondie” (1976)

Debbie Harry: We recorded “Blondie” [when Harry was 30 and Stein was 25] in a studio used by jazz musicians, and there wasn’t a lot of fancy recording technique. It was a different era. I think the fact that the album wasn’t overproduced gives it a kind of timelessness. We still perform some of those songs. Every once in a while, we drag up “X Offender” and “Rip Her to Shreds.”

Our music wasn’t just about one style or sound; we had songs that expressed different feelings and attitudes in music. A lot of things, like “Man Overboard” [a danceable heartbreak track], we really didn’t pull off the way I think Chris wanted to, but it’s there.

Chris Stein: That song would’ve worked fantastic with a dembow beat [but I wasn’t introduced to reggaeton until years later]. If I were to change anything about the album, it’d have more to do with the production than what we were slapping on the tape. Generally, we’d just go in and do a bunch of takes, pick the best one, throw some stuff on it and that was pretty much it. There was hardly any overdubbing. We learned so much from the producer Mike Chapman a couple of years later — the difference between “Blondie” and our later albums was like night and day.

Still, I like “Blondie.” It represents how we felt at the time and what was happening to us. When I look back on it, I think of the whole downtown milieu and a period in New York that I don’t know if anyone thought we’d be talking about 50 years later. — L.G.

Zadie Smith, wearing a black top and glasses, with her hair parted in the center, sits and looks over her left shoulder towards the camera. The wall behind her is red.

Smith at her mother’s home in northwest London in 2000. The author’s sixth novel, “The Fraud,” was published last year.

Courtesy of William Morrow. Photo by Joshua Scott

Zadie Smith , 48, writer, on “White Teeth” (2000)

I love the joy in my novel “White Teeth” [a multigenerational story of race and identity among the residents of London’s Willesden neighborhood], even though I haven’t picked it up in 25 years. Back then [Smith was 24 when the book came out], I was trying to write about people; I was interested in the interpersonal above all else. The people in the neighborhood I came from were always described in a manner of pathology, and I was trying to explain that we weren’t pathological. I was always writing around this kind of elephant in the room, which is what you know people have already assumed about your characters. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to do less of that because I’ve got company. There are so many writers from so many countries, particularly in West Africa, [that] I wanted to see as a child.

The cover of the book "White Teeth" with a white background and the title of the book embossed silver.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

I’ve become more interested in power lately. I’m very aware of being like the Ancient Mariner, that the structures I’m talking about that made life not always pathological have vanished. The conditions of the characters in “White Teeth” — their decent health care, their reasonable housing, their free university education — are gone. I’m still on the side of joy, but the question is, what kind of structures allow people to experience it. As I’ve gotten older, I write about them not out of nostalgia but out of political urgency. — L.G.

Two figures stand in front of a memorial with finely carved names and large dates on a black granite wall.

Left: a mock-up of Lin’s 493-foot Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Right: Lin with her parents, Julia Chang Lin and Henry Huan Lin, at her Yale graduation in 1981. The designer’s 44th sculpture, for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, is scheduled to be completed next year.

Courtesy of Maya Lin (2)

A polaroid of three figures smiling, with their hands crossed, sitting on a low stone wall in formal attire.

Lin with her parents, Julia Chang Lin and Henry Huan Lin, at her Yale graduation in 1981. The designer’s 44th sculpture, for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, is scheduled to be completed next year.

Courtesy of Maya Lin

Maya Lin , 64, sculptor, on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C.

It was a battle to keep the Vietnam Veterans Memorial simple and spare. I was moved by World War I memorials built by the French and British. They offered a much more realistic and sobering look at the high price of war, which is human life. When I went to the site [of what would become the monument] on Thanksgiving break [in 1980, when I was 20 and in my junior year at Yale], I felt a need to cut the earth and open it up. The structure isn’t so much an object inserted into the earth; it’s the earth itself being polished like a geode. I considered everything, even the walkway, which was put in to intentionally separate the wall from the ground. If you put the granite sidewalk all the way up against the wall, it would no longer be a polished geode — it’d be a curb. I put grass there. But no one could have predicted how popular it would be, so people trampled the grass and it died.

A year or two after the memorial was built, unbeknown to me, the architects of record worked with [the National] Park Service to put in [Belgian blocks on either side of the granite path]. That needs to be rethought because it’s an ugly detail. They’re out of scale. It drives me crazy every time I see it. — L.G.

Chapman with the producer David Kershenbaum at a Los Angeles recording studio in 1987. The musician’s debut album will be reissued on vinyl this summer to mark its 35th anniversary.

From left: Lester Cohen/Getty Images; courtesy of Elektra Records

A sepia-toned album cover, with the title "Tracy Chapman" rotated to the side, running vertically on the left side, and a portrait of Chapman looking down.

Courtesy of Elektra Records

Tracy Chapman , 60, musician, on “Tracy Chapman” (1988)

I had this notion when I first started writing songs that to respect the muse — or whatever source of inspiration brought me to put pen to paper — I shouldn’t do any editing. The first thing that came to me was meant to be. “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution,” which I wrote when I was 16, emerged from that mind-set. It was one of those songs that came out in one sitting. It’s a very forceful declaration.

A song like “Fast Car,” which I wrote when I was maybe 22, wasn’t a very long process, but it reflected a different strategy about songwriting. It was more about revelation, sharing a story about a person and the changes happening in their life. I made edits to “Fast Car.” I definitely changed words and lines. I’m too embarrassed to tell you exactly what, but it was the verse that starts “See, my old man’s got a problem.” Let’s just say that there was something else there.

In some ways, writing a song is about asking and answering questions: “Who is this character, why are they doing this and where is the story going?” When I was young, I thought all these questions could be answered with the first iteration of the song. I’m not as enamored with this idea that the very first thing that comes to mind is what I have to remain committed to. — L.G.

Jewel , 49, musician, on “Pieces of You” (1995)

Jewel, surrounded by people in a recording studio, wearing a white and orange striped shirt, looks back over her left shoulder.

Jewel at the musician Neil Young’s private studio in Northern California in 1994. An immersive exhibit of the singer-songwriter’s work will open at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., in May.

Courtesy of the Jewel Kilcher Archive and Bershaw Archival Management

What’s important to me about “Pieces of You” is that I made an honest album. I liked [the writers] Charles Bukowski and Anaïs Nin because they told the truth about themselves, and it wasn’t always pretty. With my work, my goal was to be just as honest. “Pieces of You” wasn’t more developed than I was — I didn’t know how to play with a band, and I didn’t choose a producer who’d make me sound slicker or lend their experience to make me sound more polished. I wanted it to be a snapshot of who I was [between 16 and 19]: inexperienced, emotionally charged and trying to figure life out.

An album cover, with the title "pieces of you" and text reading "what we call human nature in actuality is human habit." The cover image is Jewel, smiling with hair blowing in her face in a wing-shaped cutout.

Courtesy of Craft Recordings and Jewel

Writing was medicine for me. I had extreme anxiety, panic attacks and agoraphobia. I wrote songs to calm myself down and to help me fall asleep at night. I never wrote them thinking I’d have a career. There wasn’t really a craft — it was more about what comforted me, what suited me, what interested me to think and write about. I was an avid reader, and a lot of my writing took after Flannery O’Connor, [John] Steinbeck and [Anton] Chekhov, like short stories put to music.

I remember writing at that age that I didn’t want my music to be my best work of art — I wanted my life to be my best work of art. I take music seriously, but I take that promise to myself more seriously. — L.G.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

JANE FONDA AND LILY TOMLIN, ACTRESSES Have co-starred in three films and a TV show, from “9 to 5” (1980) to “80 for Brady” (2023).

Video by Kurt Collins

JANE FONDA: It was 1978, and I heard that Lily Tomlin was performing in a [one-woman] show called “Appearing Nitely” in Los Angeles. I don’t know how many characters she played, but she embodied them all so fully. I was smitten. I went backstage to meet her. At the time, I was in the process of developing “9 to 5” [the 1980 comedy about a trio of female office workers who overthrow the company’s sexist boss] and, as I was driving home, I thought, “I don’t want to be in a movie about secretaries unless Lily Tomlin is in it.”

LILY TOMLIN: She swept in backstage with a big cape on. We couldn’t believe it — this was Jane Fonda! For a couple of years, I’d worn a hairdo from “Klute” [the 1971 thriller for which Fonda won an Oscar], but I didn’t have it when she showed up that day. I was like, “Why did I drop my ‘Klute’ hairdo at this propitious time?”

J.F.: It took a good year to convince Lily and Dolly [Parton, the film’s other lead] to do the movie. It’s not that they weren’t interested, but it was very difficult. Why was it so difficult, Lily?

L.T.: I think I was that way about everything.

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomnlinn pose for a portrait. Fonda has her arms crossed and Tomlin has her hands in her pockets

From left: Fonda, 86, and Tomlin, 84, photographed at Hubble Studio in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, on Jan. 29, 2024.

Kanya Iwana

J.F.: You are that way about everything: “I don’t know if I can do this. I’m not right for the part.” You do that every time. But it was your idea to get Colin Higgins to direct and to cast Dabney Coleman [as the boss]. You should’ve been the one producing it! My only decision was to make the movie, because one of my close friends, [the former director of the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau] Karen Nussbaum, would tell me stories about organizing women office workers and what they had to go through.

L.T.: I thought I had some lines that were hitting you over the head with the joke. Yet when the movie was released, those lines got the biggest response from the audience.

J.F.: Both of us got a kick out of Dolly’s innocence. When she showed up the first day, she’d memorized the entire script. And then the day that Dolly sang —

L.T.: Oh, that was a glorious moment.

J.F.: She used her long nails like a washboard and started to sing, “Working 9 to 5. …” Lily and I looked at each other and we knew: “This is it — we’ve got an anthem.” But I think my favorite shooting experiences were when we had the dead body in the back of the car. We went to the Apple Pan [a diner in Los Angeles] because Dolly wanted to get a cheeseburger, remember?

L.T.: Everybody would tell stories about their life, and we just fell in love with each other.

J.F.: Our worlds are so different. Our backgrounds are so different. Our senses of comedy — I mean, I don’t really have one.

L.T.: Jane was so earnest. She felt so passionate about every activist problem that she was trying to solve. It was inspiring and endearing.

J.F.: Since then, we’ve done seven seasons of [the Netflix TV series] “Grace and Frankie” [which ran from 2015 to 2022]. Ten days after we wrapped, we started a movie that we both like a lot called “Moving On.” When that came out [in 2023], I was interested in the reviews — almost every one of them talked about our chemistry. And it was like, “Well, maybe we should always work together.” — E.R.A.

Fonda: Hair: Jonathan Hanousek at Exclusive Artists Management. Makeup: David Deleon at Allyson Spiegelman Management. Tomlin: Hair: Darrell Redleaf Fielder at Aim Artists Agency. Makeup: Shelley Rucker at Aim Artists Agency. On-set producer: Joy Thomas. Photo assistant: Jeremy Eric Sinclair. Digital tech: Aron Norman

MARC JACOBS, FASHION DESIGNER, AND CINDY SHERMAN, ARTIST Have collaborated on multiple projects for the Marc Jacobs brand, from a 2005 photo book to the spring 2024 campaign.

Marc Jacobs and Cindy Sherman both stand in front of a gray background wearing black shirts and raising their right arms.

From left: Jacobs, 61, and Sherman, 70, photographed at Go Studios in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, on March 5, 2024.

MARC JACOBS: In 2004, I reached out to ask if you’d [be in a Marc Jacobs campaign]. I knew your work very well, and I knew that you’d done an ad in 1984 for [the French fashion brand] Dorothée Bis. That made me think, “Maybe she’d do this with us.” I was a little intimidated about asking.

CINDY SHERMAN: I was so intimidated that you’d asked. I remember thinking, “I’m going to bring a bunch of wigs and makeup.” It was just me for a few shots, but then [the German photographer] Juergen [Teller] got playful and started putting himself in the pictures. He gradually shaved parts of his face and head. He’d started the shoot with a full head of hair and beard; by the end, he was completely bald with no facial hair at all.

M.J.: I wasn’t there, but I got calls from Juergen saying, “It’s [expletive] excellent, it’s [expletive] excellent.” He says that when he’s really excited. You created some hilarious characters. There was one where you were both older, sitting on a bench.

C.S.: Rifling through a big bag.

M.J.: That image became a billboard on Melrose [Avenue in Los Angeles]. It was great because fashion campaigns like that didn’t exist back then. Nobody would’ve ever said, “ That’s our ad,” because it wasn’t exactly selling clothes or bags. But it was exciting.

C.S.: What’s funny is that you’d asked me, a year or two ago during Covid, to do something — I don’t even remember what it was. I’d gained a bit of weight, so I was self-conscious and kept turning you down. [For the 2024 campaign I ended up doing] some of the outfits were a little tight. The people assisting me said, “We can fix that.” And I said, “No, no, it’s [perfect for] the character.” I guess I could’ve thought of someone who was trying to hide, but I decided, “No, she seems like she could just let it all hang out in her leather pants.” How do you feel when you see different types of women wearing your pieces or putting them together in unusual ways?

M.J.: It’s the ultimate validation. Of all the stuff that exists out there, they’re spending their money on something I’ve made. How about you with collectors?

C.S.: Sometimes it’s a little weird. I remember an early series of horizontal pictures that I called “The Centerfolds” (1981) — I thought they were kind of disturbing, but some collector said, “I have that one hanging over my bed because it’s so sexy.” And I’m thinking, “Ugh, I don’t want to know that.” But you can’t control what happens to a piece.

M.J.: Or what other people see in it. Feedback is part of the equation. It’s like, “I’m not just doing this for me. I need you.” — E.R.A.

Production: Prodn. Hair: Tsuki at Streeters. Makeup assistant: Nanase. Photo assistants: John Temones, Tony Jarum, Logan Khidekel

CARLOS NAZARIO, STYLIST, AND WILLY CHAVARRIA, FASHION DESIGNER Have worked together on three collections since 2022.

Willy Chavarria, wearing a black T-shirt and necklaces, stands and crosses his arms. Next to him sits Carlos Nazario, wearing a white T-shirt.

From left: Nazario, 36, and Chavarria, 56, photographed at Chavarria’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on March 18, 2024.

Emiliano Granado

WILLY CHAVARRIA: Carlos and I would see each other at Calvin Klein [Nazario has styled for the brand; Chavarria was its senior vice president of design from 2021 until 2023], but our first formal meeting was lunch at the Odeon. Like Truman Capote’s swans, we had salads and talked about water and weight loss.

CARLOS NAZARIO: It wasn’t like we were meeting to discuss a project. That sort of evolved organically.

W.C.: I was terrified to ask you to work with me. I remember texting to [see] if you’d style my [fall 2023] show. Do you know what you said? “I thought you’d never ask.”

C.N.: Willy’s work spoke to me in such a profound way. There was such a similarity — if not in aesthetic, definitely in intention. A lot of brands lack depth and a soul. I’m Afro-Latino. I grew up in New York with a certain relationship to how one presents themselves to the world, what glamour means and looks like and how it’s communicated. I was always intrigued by how Willy’s designs encompassed all those things.

W.C.: [The way we collaborate] is so natural and unpretentious. We end up telling a story that we feel good about.

C.N.: Every relationship between a stylist and designer is unique. Some designers require a lot more — from research to manufacturing and the show. Others want you to come in right at the end and say, “Let’s put that on this model.” With Willy, our conversations prior to my first day were conceptual. We talked about what he wanted it to feel like, rather than what he wanted it to look like.

W.C.: For that first show together, we wanted the cast — all people of color, many of them queer and trans — to feel elevated and empowered. Marlon [Taylor-Wiles, the show’s movement director] was going to have the models look down at the guests.

C.N.: At the rehearsal, we were like, “Maybe it’s a bit creepy.” I wasn’t uncomfortable [giving my opinion] because Willy’s such an easy person to talk to. But anytime you’re coming into a space where everyone has clearly defined roles, you feel like a stepparent. You’re a bit like, “Do I discipline the daughter? Do I tell her the skirt’s too short?” I didn’t want to overstep, but I also wanted to make my presence worth it. As we got more comfortable [with each other], we got more comfortable trying things.

W.C.: The next season, we took more risks. We wanted it to feel refined and elegant, but we also wanted to inject a youthfulness.

C.N.: At a lot of [brands], it’s like, “This season, everything’s a miniskirt. If your thighs aren’t great, see you in the fall!” Willy’s casting allows for a very broad vision in terms of what the styling can do: You’ll have someone like me, who’s 5-foot-4 [Nazario walked in the fall 2024 show], and then you’ll have someone who’s 6-foot-4.

W.C.: You’ll have a woman in her late 50s and a 17-year-old boy.

C.N.: Everyone from twinks to daddies. If you tried to dress everyone the same, it’d be a disaster.

W.C.: I can suggest something that you don’t like, and you’ll say, “Let’s go with it. Let’s see.” And I’ll do the same. I’ve worked with stylists who will deliberate over the positioning of a hat for hours. The stress level is so intense, it kills the moment. Having the freedom [to experiment reflects] a levity we want the brand to have. You know, we address serious subjects, like human rights, inclusion …

C.N.: Self-identity. But if we’re stressed, everyone’s stressed. We try to keep it light, but we also understand the weight of the responsibility. It’s rare that you work with people who understand what you’re feeling and what you want to convey. And I think our trust lies in that. — N.H.

Photo assistants: Eamon Colbert, Jordan Zuppa

MINK STOLE, ACTRESS, AND JOHN WATERS, FILMMAKER Have worked together on almost every one of his movies since “Roman Candles” (1967), including “Pink Flamingos” (1972), “Hairspray” (1988) and “A Dirty Shame” (2004).

Video by Melody Melamed

MINK STOLE: John, I’ve just been told your conference line is charging me a penny a minute.

JOHN WATERS: Oh, c’mon. I’ve been using it for 20 years. It’s never said that.

M.S.: It’s fine. I can handle it.

T: How did you two first meet?

J.W.: Mink also grew up in Baltimore, although I was friends with her older sister Mary, who now goes by Sique. My memory’s that we met in Provincetown, Mass., right before doing my second movie [the 1967 short] “Roman Candles” [in which Stole plays a party guest who gets spanked]. She was looking to go bad and found the right crowd. Prescott Townsend, one of the first gay radicals, allowed us to live in a tree fort he’d made.

M.S.: That was the summer I got introduced to homosexuality.

J.W.: Did we take acid that summer?

M.S.: I kind of think we did, yeah.

J.W.: And then we took it again 50 years later. My mother always used to say, “Don’t tell young people to take drugs.” But I’m not — I’m telling old people to. Anyway, we shot “Roman Candles” partly at my parents’ house and, oddly enough, a decade later, you filmed a big scene at that same house, in my parents’ bedroom, when you played [the delusional housewife] Peggy Gravel in “Desperate Living” [1977].

Mink Stole and John Waters, both wearing white shirts and dark gray jackets pose against a light gray background.

From left: Stole, 76, and Waters, 77, photographed, respectively, at Edge Studios in Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles, on Feb. 4, 2024, and at Waters’s home in Tuscany-Canterbury, Baltimore, on March 7, 2024.

Melody Melamed

M.S.: We threw a baseball through a window and kind of trashed the place. Your mom was a sport.

J.W.: So was yours. Mink and I were arrested [along with three other members of the crew] for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure while making [the 1969 film] “Mondo Trasho.” It was in the paper. They printed your poor mother’s address.

M.S.: We were acquitted.

J.W.: We’d been filming a scene at Johns Hopkins University with [the actor and drag performer] Divine, in full makeup and a gold lamé top with matching toreador pants, in a 1959 red Cadillac convertible with the top down in November. I never asked permission [to shoot]. The police came and we all ran. The fact that we got caught and Divine escaped didn’t say a lot for the Baltimore police. Mink played an escaped mental patient; she did a nude tap dance.

M.S.: I’d get upset when the press would call us unprofessional because, although it was true that not one of us had ever taken an acting lesson, we were incredibly professional. And none of it was ad-libbed. John wouldn’t have tolerated that. He knew every comma, every “and,” every “but.”

J.W.: What’s that French term for people who go crazy when they’re together?

M.S.: “Folie à something”?

J.W.: “Folie à famille.” Everybody chipped in, and we just went for it.

T: Mink, were there any scenes you refused to shoot?

M.S.: Before we started filming “Pink Flamingos” [1972, in which Stole plays the proprietor of a black-market baby ring], John very casually said, “Will you set your hair on fire?” And I said, “Yes, that’ll look great on film.” But then as the moment approached, I panicked.

J.W.: I was on pot when I thought of that.

M.S.: It would’ve been great, except that I’d be bald today. I think that’s the only thing I ever refused to do.

T: What’ve you learned from each other?

M.S.: In the early films, we all acted largely. We spoke in italics. In the later ones, when I’d start to behave that way, John would say, “Take it down.” I was shocked [the first time he said it].

J.W.: When we made those early movies, I was influenced by the theater of the ridiculous — by cruelty, shouting and craziness. It wasn’t them overacting, it was me telling them to overact.

M.S.: I have enormous respect for John, and John for me. Aside from the fact that I love him dearly, I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t met him.

J.W.: And we’ve never had the same boyfriend.

M.S.: Or wanted the same boyfriend.

J.W.: Mink and I have been through a lot together. We’ve fought, we’ve made up. I don’t trust people who don’t have old friends. For me, they outlast family. Mink and I are even going to be buried together in the same graveyard. We call it Disgraceland. — N.H.

Waters: Makeup: Cheryl Pickles Kinion. Photo assistants: Daniel Garton, Ashley Poole

COBY KENNEDY AND HANK WILLIS THOMAS, ARTISTS Have spent three decades collaborating on public art installations and community-focused projects, including 2023’s “Reach,” a more than 2,700-pound fiberglass-and-resin sculpture at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport of two hands nearly touching.

Coby Kennedy and Hank Willis Thomas pose in front of a gray background.

From left: Kennedy, 47, and Thomas, 48, photographed at Thomas’s studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Feb. 28, 2024.

D’Angelo Lovell Williams

COBY KENNEDY: We met on a collaboration, actually. It was the summer of 1992.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS: I’d been recruited to work with Coby to renovate the darkroom at Howard University [in Washington, D.C.], where his father [Winston Kennedy] was the chair of the art program. We were in high school. Building a darkroom when you don’t really know how — that’s kind of the way we’ve always worked. Back then, Coby was a street writer.

C.K.: A graffiti writer, in the parlance of our times. My graffiti and school crews melded into this conglomerate [called] the Earthbound Homies.

H.W.T.: This was [during the] peak ’90s hip-hop days. The group was [made up of] all these young, primarily Black artists. I wasn’t one of them, I was a documenter.

C.K.: Hank was in museum studies, while the rest of us were in visual arts. He was very quiet and observant. It felt like he was always regarding you.

H.W.T.: The core of our relationship has been fostering opportunities for others to interlace their practices. The Wide Awakes [their most recent art collective, named after a progressive group that supported Abraham Lincoln during the 1860 presidential election] took off in my old studio in December 2019.

C.K.: We were trying to plug into society and see how we could influence it. When 2020 happened — the pandemic, the lockdown, the insurrection — we really hit the accelerator with it.

H.W.T.: I’d call the Wide Awakes our first public collaboration. But then again, 2016 is when “Reach” [their sculpture at Chicago’s O’Hare airport] first started. We’re excited to have it be one of the largest public acknowledgments of something we’ve been doing for 30 years.

C.K.: In our collaborations, we kind of fill in each other’s gaps.

H.W.T.: As a conceptual artist, I have great ideas — a lot of them. Coby, who has a history as an industrial designer and animator, is the bridge between the proposal and how it happens. With virtually every one of my public sculptures, he’s done all the initial concepting. He’s always had this ability to see what others are thinking. We also have different tastes.

C.K.: And they’re sometimes at odds with each other, which is one of the best parts [of our working relationship], because I’d hate for both of us to be middle ground.

H.W.T.: Coby has a very clear, singular vision, while I create art through consensus. I want to make a statement [so I’m often asking others], “What do you think about it?” I envy Coby’s talent. But I also think not having his talent gives me a reliance on other people, which is helpful in the context of making public art.

C.K.: I know that he’ll tell me the truth about anything I come up with, and he knows that if I have to talk trash about one of his ideas, I’ll talk trash about it.

H.W.T.: As much as I’d like Coby to think like me, then he wouldn’t be him and I wouldn’t be me. We allow each other to be who we are. — N.A.

INGAR DRAGSET AND MICHAEL ELMGREEN, ARTISTS Have worked as the duo Elmgreen & Dragset on more than 90 solo shows and site-specific installations, including a 2005 replica of a Prada store near Marfa, Texas, since 1995.

A portrait of Dragset and Elmgreen smiling and standing in front of a gray background. Dragset wears a black T-shirt and Elmgreen wears a black hoodie.

From left: Dragset, 54, and Elmgreen, 62, photographed at their studio in Neukölln, Berlin, on Feb. 7, 2024.

Julia Sellmann

INGAR DRAGSET: We met at After Dark, the only gay club at the time in Copenhagen, in 1994. I was 24 and Michael was 32. I thought he looked amazing — he had this Dennis Rodman-style hair that was bleached with baroque black patterns on it. We both had big Dr. Martens boots and were much grungier than the rest of the crowd.

MICHAEL ELMGREEN: The club was a classic disco — a lot of blown-out hair and Gloria Gaynor. It wasn’t difficult to spot each other.

I.D.: We got more than a little tipsy. When we both started to walk home, we realized that we lived not only in the same neighborhood but in the same building. That was the beginning of our 10-year romantic relationship. The artistic collaboration started eight months later, a little bit by accident. I was doing theater at the time.

M.E.: I was writing poetry and experimenting with texts that would morph in front of people’s eyes on IBM computers. To my surprise, I was considered a visual artist.

I.D.: Michael got invited to do an exhibition in Stockholm. He had the idea of creating abstract pets that people could cuddle, but he didn’t know how to make them. And I said, “Well, I’m good at knitting.” So that’s how the collaboration started.

M.E.: The Swedes are, as we know, a bit stiff; they were terrified about interacting with the artwork. So we were sitting in [opposite] corners with these knitted pets, cuddling them, and people thought it was a performance.

I.D.: That accidental performance inspired us to do more. The next one was a piece where I was furiously knitting at one end of a very long white cloth while Michael was unraveling everything from the other end. That should tell you a bit about our partnership.

M.E.: When we were coupled, we were almost the same size in clothes, so we even shared socks, we shared bank accounts, all our friends.

I.D.: We had one email account, one cellphone.

M.E.: Starting a new chapter after we split up was like meeting again, workwise. We had separate lives for some hours of the day. Suddenly, you could bring in exciting things that the other hadn’t experienced.

I.D.: It was a very difficult time. We put most things on hold, but we had one exhibition that would’ve been hard to cancel: a solo show at Tate Modern [in London]. In a big room with a window overlooking the Thames, we added another windowpane and, in between the panes, we had an animatronic but very realistic-looking sparrow that seemed to be gasping for life and flapping its wings, and nobody could help it.

M.E.: I think the beauty of it all was that we dared to stop being boyfriends because we knew we wouldn’t lose each other. Today, it’d be impossible to say who came up with what idea. It’s not two half authorships. It’s like this imaginary third persona in between us that we feed — an invisible genius kid who’s much, much younger, brighter and more charming than either of us. He’s creating the artworks. — J.H.

BOBBI SALVÖR MENUEZ, ACTOR, AND MICHAEL BAILEY-GATES, ARTIST Have collaborated on dozens of performances and photography projects throughout their decade-long friendship.

A portrait of Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Michael Bailey-Gates against a gray background.

From left: Menuez, 30, and Bailey-Gates, 30, photographed at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 1, 2024.

BOBBI SALVÖR MENUEZ: I curated a 2014 show at [the Brooklyn exhibition space] Muddguts that was part of a series in which I invited people who didn’t always make performance work to create something in a performance context. We’d been in a group show together before and had mutual friends, and I was excited about the work I was seeing Michael make.

MICHAEL BAILEY-GATES: It was me, Bobbi and maybe two or three other people. I had this party trick of being able to talk really fast, like an auctioneer. When I said certain phrases, one of them would stand up, and another would scream at the top of their lungs or throw an object at someone.

B.S.M.: It felt like the beginning of us making things together on the fly. We both had this down-to-get-into-it energy that was well matched.

M.B.G.: We shared an urgency to make work come to life. Sometimes it’s as simple as being a body for another person. I’ve been the lead in Bobbi’s performances, and I’ve been in the background, lying on a floor covered in red paint. Performance art in New York at the time was about executing an idea without a lot of money. These days, I don’t go into a shoot thinking we’re performing, but it’s very much that: The camera is the audience looking back at us.

B.S.M.: Michael has this ability to see the kaleidoscopic possibility of someone’s self- expression. Around 2018, I was out as nonbinary to my close friends and finding my new name. I took a break from auditions and started working part-time as a substitute teacher. When a film I’d shot the year before got into [the 2019] Sundance [Film Festival], it was an invitation to step back into the spotlight. I’d shaved my head and was nervous about that formal, public coming- out moment. It just felt so cringe. I went to Los Angeles before going to Sundance and made some pictures with Michael that were only for us. Those were the first images of Bobbi that entered the world.

M.B.G.: I never want to make a picture of somebody that’s not reflective of them. I’ve chosen in my practice to always focus on a small group of friends, and those collaborations are the grounding force of my work. Without them, what would my pictures be? They’d be something less precious. — C.R.

Makeup: Zenia Jaeger at Streeters using Submission Beauty. Hair assistant: Drew Martin. Production: Resin Projects. Photo assistants: Michael Preman, Jack Buster

Humberto Leon, restaurateur and creative director

Humberto Leon rests his cheek on his hand and leans his elbow on a countertop. He is wearing a black jacket with white stripes and a white shirt.

Leon, 48, photographed at his restaurant Chifa in Los Angeles on Dec. 14, 2023.

Ryan James Caruthers

Then: The co-founder, with Carol Lim, of Opening Ceremony, the influential New York clothing store established in 2002; the co-creative director of the French fashion house Kenzo between 2011 and 2019.

Now: Co-runs three restaurants in Los Angeles — Chifa, Monarch and Arroz & Fun.

In 1975, the year I was born, my mom opened a restaurant in Lima — my mom’s from Hong Kong, my dad from Peru — and so I’ve always thought of a meal as a way to learn and to meet new people. In 2020, I’d recently quit Kenzo and sold Opening Ceremony. My sisters and brother-in-law were in the midst of changes of their own, and we’d always wanted to tell my mom’s story. So we decided to open a restaurant together in Eagle Rock, the Los Angeles neighborhood where my family first lived when we immigrated to the United States in the late ’70s. We named it Chifa, after my mom’s place in Lima, and based the menu on a similar mix of classic Peruvian dishes like lomo saltado (beef stir fry) and anticucho (meat skewers) and Chinese home cooking — though my brother-in-law, the chef John Liu, has added some of his Taiwanese family’s culinary staples, too.

Starting anything new is scary, and I didn’t have the confidence to do so until the pandemic, which gave me time to try new ideas. (I also wrote a screenplay and a script for a TV show.) I tried to channel the intuition [I’d brought to Opening Ceremony] into other fields. I realized that what I’d done with the store was ultimately about the fond memories people had of the place rather than any specific product. Food does something similar: It creates conversations and memories.

I had the same feeling when I opened the store: “Will anyone show up?” We’d built Opening Ceremony from the ground up — no ads, only word of mouth — and that experience lent itself to launching Chifa, as well as Monarch and Arroz & Fun [our second and third restaurants, which opened last year in the Arcadia and Lincoln Heights neighborhoods, respectively]. In many ways, I’m bringing the same sensibility to the restaurants that I brought to Opening Ceremony: They’re places where you can discover new things. We aren’t aiming for formality or perfection. If anything, part of the experience is dropping your fork and noticing the cool terrazzo floor or really looking at the flatware, which we made with the designer Izabel Lam. As a person who shops and eats a lot, I want to be excited, to feel that nervousness of trying something new. — M.S.

Nick Cave, musician, writer and artist

Nick Cave, wearing a shirt, tie and white jacket and sitting in a pink room in front of a tall mirror, holds a paint brush above a porcelain figure. In front of him, on the table, are paint palates, a bowl of fruit and various sculptures.

Cave, 66, photographed at his studio near his home in Brighton, England, on Jan. 29, 2024.

Then: Rose to prominence with his post-punk band the Bad Seeds, formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1983; became one of rock’s most celebrated lyricists and performers.

Now: Makes ceramics at a studio close to his home on the south coast of England, and his first major solo show, “ The Devil — A Life ,” is on view now through May 11 at Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels. Will release a new record with the Bad Seeds later this year.

I learned early on that the grand designs you have in life don’t always pan out. Starting in secondary school, I wanted to be a painter. I went to art school [for university in 1976] and, to my horror, failed my second year. At the same time, my first band [the Boys Next Door, which eventually became the Birthday Party] was starting to do well in the underground scene in Melbourne. I was much more interested in painting — I did figurative work that often referenced myself — but I’d failed, so I carried on with the band.

I started making ceramics during the pandemic. I collect Victorian Staffordshire-style figurines, the sort of thing an English grandmother might have on her mantelpiece, and one day I thought, “I could make these.” I found I was really swept up by clay. I struggle hugely with writing songs — not the music, but the lyrics. They never feel good enough. Mostly it’s all doubt and despair. But I don’t think I’ve felt more pleasure than I have when pulling a piece out of the kiln and looking at something I’ve made with my hands.

At some point, I had an idea to make a devil, mostly because I wanted to paint a figure in a fiery red glaze. I made one devil and then others, and eventually they began to tell a story. In the beginning, there’s a sort of lightheartedness about this wicked little guy: In his youth, he’s embedded in the world and in love with it. But then he kills his child, and [the figures] get dark and desperate. Later, he becomes remorseful and dies a terrible death. And in the end he’s forgiven by his child.

The death of a child is obviously very important to me because two of my own children have died. [Cave’s son Arthur died in 2015 at age 15. His oldest son, Jethro, died in 2022 at age 31.] And the works were saying something very powerful to me about my unfolding situation in life, something that my songs didn’t really talk about. I found that I could look at this poor devil in a pool of tears, with his lost child extending his hand to him, as a kind of meditation on my own place in the world and find a way that I — or we or whoever — may live a life. — M.H.M.

Jordi Roca, pastry chef

In an ice cream shop with blue walls and pipes painted red and white, Jordi Roca leans on a glass countertop covering various tubs of ice cream and toppings.

Roca, 45, photographed at Rocambolesc Gelateria in Girona, Spain, on March 13, 2024.

Anna Bosch Miralpeix

Then: Joined the restaurant El Celler de Can Roca — founded in 1986 by his brothers, Joan and Josep, in Girona, Spain — in 1997, becoming head pastry chef in 2000.

Now: After starting his own gelateria chain, Rocambolesc, in Girona with his wife, Alejandra Rivas, in 2012, and being diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder four years later, opened an outpost of the gelateria in Houston in 2022 with a neurodiverse team.

When I first started to lose my voice, it didn’t have much of an effect on my creative process in the kitchen. I had to learn to interact more through gesture, but I could still speak during quieter moments. That was around 2016, when I was giving a lot of interviews. It was a period in my career when I needed to speak but, instead, was a time of introspection. Once I got the diagnosis — I have an unusual expression of spasmodic dysphonia [a neurological disorder that causes spasms in the voice box] — it meant I could finally move forward. Now I think of this as just part of who I am.

The idea to open a U.S. branch of Rocambolesc, the gelateria, which has five locations in Spain, came a year or so before this. In 2015, when we were [hosting] cooking events around the world for Celler de Can Roca, we met our business partner Ignacio Torres in Houston. He has family members with autism, and having a place that would hire people with autism and Down syndrome was part of his idea from the beginning. By the time we opened Rocambolesc in Houston in 2022, we’d already had experiences in Celler de Can Roca with team members who had neurological differences. But staffing a project with a neurodiverse team was a huge personal gamble taken by Ignacio and his wife, Isabel, to transform the stigmas around neurodivergence in the United States. The project’s really been embraced in Houston. We have staff who’ve been with us right from the beginning. Of course, my own difficulties have given me a deeper empathy with people who can’t always express themselves in the way they might like. But what I’ve learned — especially through this project — is that we all live in the same world. There’re just many ways to see it. — M.S.

Cassi Namoda, painter

Cassi Namoda leans back on a step ladder with one arm over a large painting of a woman with green outlines on an orange background. Around her, in a large space with a brick roof and plenty of pillars, various paintings are displayed.

Namoda, 35, photographed with paintings in progress at her studio in Biella, Italy, on Feb. 25, 2024.

Claudia Gori

Then: A visual artist known for her spare yet color-rich depictions of contemporary African people and landscapes who was last based in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts.

Now: Living in Biella, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, where she’s working in a new studio and preparing to become a mother.

Biella has a beautiful, fantastical landscape — you have a backdrop of the snowcapped Alps, but there are also palm trees, beeches, pines and cypresses. It’s an easier flight to my family in Mozambique [than from the United States]. And we’re a 10-minute drive away from my husband’s family.

I found an incredible studio where I can visualize having my child and making magnificent work. The commercial art world is a masculine environment. But this is my own world. There’s a large kitchen with big windows and an amazing chef’s oven, so there can be lunches. I’ll put in a daybed because I know I need naps. There’ll be a baby corner, with a crib and maybe some safe paints. I’m really into self-preservation and embracing femininity.

My life before was very utilitarian. Some days, I’d get to the studio early and be there until 3 or 4 a.m., eating popcorn and puffing on a cigarette. The child has already forced me to have a healthier balance with work. But I have these dreams about me before [there was] this new spirit in me. It’s not a somber or sad thing, like, “Oh, I wish I was Cassi in Tambacounda, Senegal, plein-air painting in the field.” But I’m remembering that person.

I finally got into the Italian health care system, which has been a nightmare. It’s not superfriendly to foreigners. Meanwhile, I’m preparing for a solo exhibition in September and a museum show opening in December. In my head I’m like, “The baby’s coming really soon, I don’t really have a doctor, I’m still setting up my studio and I have a 53-foot-long cargo container with all of my belongings arriving on Monday!”

There are large works to start but, with this heavy belly, I can’t balance on a ladder. I might bring the canvases down to the floor and rest them on bricks. I’m visiting a softer, more romantic side. The world’s in a dark place; why not make something beautiful? I’m seeing flamingo pink and yellow and sandy tones. It’s soft and rosy. I don’t think it’s because I’m having a girl — the sex of the baby is a surprise — but that’s how I’m feeling right now. — E.L.

Jon Bon Jovi, musician and singer-songwriter

Bon Jovi, with gray hair pushed to one side, wears a leather jacket and leans his elbows on a wooden table and looks into the camera.

Bon Jovi, 62, photographed at his restaurant JBJ Soul Kitchen in Red Bank, N.J., on March 1, 2024.

Sebastian Sabal-Bruce

Then: Co-founded the rock band Bon Jovi in Sayreville, N.J., in 1983. Began experiencing vocal difficulties in 2014.

Now: Is recovering from throat surgery, a process depicted, among other things, in the docuseries “Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story,” out this month. Will release a new album, “Forever,” with the band in June.

My problems started about a decade ago. In 2013, we had the number one tour in the world, and I was great for 100-plus shows. But in 2014, I wasn’t really making any music, which was hard psychologically. Then some of the recordings and shows we did, especially after 2017, were challenging — my range seemed to have narrowed and it was becoming difficult to sing consistently. But none of the professionals I saw could figure it out.

In March 2022, a doctor in Philadelphia explained that one of my vocal cords was atrophying. I thought I could get my voice back in shape if I just did enough shows, so I went back on the road. But it was a struggle. Finally, that June, I had an implant put [inside the cartilage of my larynx] to bring my [vocal folds] together. There was no singing at all for the first six weeks. Then I started speech therapy. I have rehab four times a week. But I’m still not sure what to expect. Yesterday when I was rehearsing with the band, I had a rough go with the song “Limitless” from the album “2020” [released by the group that same year]. I said, “Guys, I only ever sang this song when I was broken. I don’t know how to sing it not broken.” If I had the word “lay,” I’d put an “E” on the end of it to try to push it up to pitch: “layeee.” But right after that, I popped the high notes on [our 1986 hit] “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

This new album’s much more of a collaborative record than the ones I’ve made in the past. It’s a celebration of my accepting any and all input and acts of kindness. It’s not been a good decade. It’s not been easy to not be the best guy in the band; it’s not easy to be the worst. It’s humbling but I don’t mind the humility. I just want my tools back. Yesterday, I pressed the point-of-no-return button and said yes, in theory, to a handful of possible shows abroad for the summer, the first ones since the spring of 2022. I’m not an applause junkie. I do it because I love to write a song and play it for people. If I have all my tools, it’ll be a joy. — E.L.

Grooming: Loraine Abeles

Titus Kaphar, artist

Titus Kaphar sits on an office chair in a gallery space with three large paintings of the exteriors of houses hanging on the walls.

Kaphar, 47, photographed at his studio in New Haven, Conn., on Feb. 22, 2024.

Artwork, from left: Titus Kaphar, “I Knew,” 2023 © Titus Kaphar; Titus Kaphar, “Do You Want It Back?” 2023 © Titus Kaphar; Titus Kaphar, “Some Things Can’t Be Worked Out on Canvas,” 2023 © Titus Kaphar

Then: An artist whose works, which often confront family history and the experience of being Black in America, are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions.

Now: Wrote and directed his first feature-length film, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” which premiered at Sundance in January. Paintings Kaphar made for the film (pictured above) will be shown at Gagosian in Beverly Hills in September.

“Exhibiting Forgiveness” started as a series of paintings — in particular, with one of a burning lawn mower. It didn’t take long to realize that what I was doing wasn’t best processed with paintings alone. [The film focuses on a successful artist, Tarrell, played by André Holland, who struggles to deal with the reappearance of his estranged, abusive father, La’Ron, played by John Earl Jelks, who’d force Tarrell to perform grueling manual labor as a child.] The power of painting’s often the absences: what’s not there, what’s implicit. You don’t know what happened before and you don’t know what will happen after. In film, you have an opportunity for elaboration.

I’ve tried hard not to read reviews of the film, though a friend sent me one. It was positive but what [the critic] wrote at the end, I’ll never forget. He said, “But I can’t say this film is entertaining.” [ Laughs. ] With film, some of us expect entertainment, to have a great time. And that response does frame the way we distinguish film from painting. As a painter, I don’t stand in front of [Pablo Picasso’s] “Guernica” and go, “This isn’t entertaining!” I didn’t approach filmmaking as anything different from painting. I wanted the film to be a painting in motion. The way I make decisions in the studio, about how to follow my intuition or instincts, or how to lay out a composition, was the same process I used on set. The difference is I had an extraordinary cinematographer and cast of actors to help me realize the paintings in my head.

At its essence, “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is about generational healing. I took on this project because I wanted to have a conversation with my children about the world I grew up in, which is so different from the world they’ve grown up in. And I think making the film helped resolve something within me. The revelation I had is that I can’t make my father out as the villain in my mind. He’s a victim of violence himself. And even though [he] created challenges for me, I’ve never wondered whether or not he loved me. — M.H.M.

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, artist

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane wearing a double-breasted black jacket stands in a doorway.

Sánchez-Kane, 36, photographed at his studio (the artist uses she/her and he/him pronouns interchangeably) in Mexico City on Jan. 22, 2024.

Ana Topoleanu. Artwork, clockwise from left: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, “La Diegada,” 2016, courtesy of the artist and Estudio Sánchez-Kane; Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, “Tragic Stages,” 2023, courtesy of the artist and Estudio Sánchez-Kane; Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, “Moctezuma’s Revenge,” 2017, performance by Sierva M, courtesy of the artist and Estudio Sánchez-Kane, photo: Karla Ximena

Then: The designer of Sánchez-Kane, the genderless clothing brand she founded in Mérida, Mexico, in 2016.

Now: An artist working with painting, sculpture and performance — while still running the label.

One of my first shows in a museum was at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2017. The curators invited me to present a collection from my fashion line that I’d shown in New York, and I said, “No, but maybe I can do a performance.” There’s a kind of freedom in making wearable sculptures because, in the end, clothing has to be ergonomic: The jacket I made with boxing gloves has an opening for your hands so you can eat a burger. But for the ICA show, I created a pair of transparent plastic pants with a metal frame that made them almost impossible to walk in. And last year, for my first New York solo exhibition, at Kurimanzutto gallery, I made a piece from 1,170 black plastic belts that was so big and heavy, I had to break it into parts to show it. I remember reading an article by the queer theorist Jack Halberstam on the work of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who would [create] windows in structures where they shouldn’t be. For me, the work is like that: opening windows that give you a different way of seeing what’s in front of you.

I started as an industrial engineer first and then became a fashion designer, but I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter what you’ve studied or haven’t. When I feel like the worst sculptor, I think, “Well, at least I’m a good designer.” And when I feel like a great sculptor, I might look at [the clothes in my studio] and think, “Those terrible [expletive] trousers!” Expanding into other fields is a way to embrace yourself. All we have is our imagination, which allows us to create things: objects, garments, skins that we wear when we go out into the world. I’m not saying they’ll save us, but maybe they can help us navigate the transition to another universe. — M.S.

Miguel Adrover, 58, Calonge, Majorca

A black-and-white portrait of Miguel Adrover with a feather in his hair wearing a black suit jacket.

The former fashion designer Miguel Adrover, now a full-time photographer, photographed at home on Majorca, Spain, on Jan. 8, 2024.

The provocative Spanish fashion designer, who had a New York-based clothing line, put a sheep on the runway and made a coat out of the ticking from the gay icon Quentin Crisp’s discarded mattress. He left the industry over a decade ago.

I started my own line in 1999 in New York, where I had been living in the East Village since 1991, and shut it down in 2005 and left the city. In 2012, I [returned] to present one runway show, which I called Out of My Mind. It was made up of personal garments I’d repurposed. I was 46.

I’d been trying to find a way out of this unsustainable industry, this imaginary fantasy that fashion creates. My collections dealt with social justice, environmental consciousness and diversity before those topics became mainstream, and some seasons I didn’t sell anything. I never had a sugar daddy, and I invested everything I made back into the company.

I miss New York a lot. I’m homesick for it, but it isn’t the same city, and fashion is very different, too — it feels inauthentic and disconnected from reality. When I was doing consulting and research for Alexander McQueen [in the mid-90s], we had no money. But the energy was amazing. When you don’t have money, that’s when you’re most creative. Now all of these big companies have so much money that it feels like a different world. [Still] I’d love to have the chance to put on one last presentation, one last show to express how I feel today and how I see the world right now.

When I left New York, I decided to come to Majorca, where my parents have a farm. I started doing photography accidentally; I had no knowledge of cameras, every day was a process of me learning something totally on my own. There was a 300-year-old well on the property with no water inside, and I realized it could be my studio. It’s kind of like a basement; light comes from a little window high above. It reminds me of my apartment in New York. It’s where I develop my [projects]. I use things that surround me: tulips and rose bushes, fruit trees, a tropical garden, chickens.

When I got here, I didn’t have a team [as I did in fashion], and one of the challenges was being surrounded by people who don’t care about what I did or what I’m doing. Photography was the ideal thing to do because I don’t need anybody, I can do it on my own. I don’t have any models; I started working with mannequins and, for many years, I collected them on eBay or from secondhand stores on the island. [I decided] I’d rather not use models — when you photograph human beings, they’re pretending or acting, and I was running away from that.

It’s been nine years since I found photography, and I’m really happy. I have a monograph coming out later this year. The photographs are like my biography. I’ve developed my style in photography and I have a creative language. Fashion was the platform I once used, but the soul inside me is the same. — interview by J.W.

Ralph Ellison, writer, circa 1913-94

Ralph Ellison sits in front of an a typewriter under an awning writing.

Ralph Ellison, the author of the 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” in June 1957 during his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

James Whitmore/The Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ralph Ellison spent seven years writing his only completed novel, “Invisible Man,” and its publication in 1952, when he was in his late 30s, not only catapulted him to literary fame but made him nothing less than a spokesperson for postwar America. His contemporary Norman Mailer would write of him that at his best, “He writes so perfectly that one can never forget the experience of reading him.” “Invisible Man,” a surreal picaresque that follows an unnamed Black protagonist — “a man of substance, of flesh and bone,” Ellison writes — as he travels through a country full of people who “refuse to see me,” is a book of such remarkable confidence that Ellison’s career, in later years, became mired in questions of what next? Ellison, a prolific writer of essays, reviews and criticism, worked for years on a follow-up, suffering one setback when a 1967 house fire destroyed portions of his manuscript. When he died in 1994, he left behind thousands of pages of drafts, fragments and unfinished tangents. Ellison’s literary executor and longtime friend, John F. Callahan, tried to edit the material down into a “single, coherent narrative,” as he put it, and published the result, called “Juneteenth,” in 1999; the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called it “disappointingly provisional and incomplete.” Ellison often struggled with writing. He once likened his second novel to a “bad case of constipation” and, in a 1958 letter to his friend the author Saul Bellow, Ellison wrote, “I’ve got a natural writer’s block as big as the Ritz and as stubborn as a grease spot on a gabardine suit.” — M.H.M.

Charles Laughton, actor and director, 1899-1962

Charles Laughton sits in a director's chair wearing a straw hat with a girl looking through a viewfinder in his lap.

The actor turned director Charles Laughton with the actress Sally Jane Bruce on the set of “The Night of the Hunter” (1955).

Everett Collection

Born in the last year of the 19th century, Charles Laughton left his family’s successful hotel business at the age of 26 to study acting at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. What he lacked in movie star looks — the critic J. Hoberman described him as “coarse-featured, overweight and slovenly” — he made up for in talent. Following a successful stage career in London’s West End, he turned to film, making a name for himself as a versatile character actor in the 1930s and ’40s. In 1955, at the age of 55, he made his most indelible contribution to his craft, directing “The Night of the Hunter,” a film noir so dark it easily passes today as horror. (William Friedkin, the director of 1973’s “The Exorcist,” described it as “one of the scariest films ever made.”) Robert Mitchum plays a terrifying ex-convict posing as a preacher and stalking the children of his former cellmate in order to find a hidden fortune. While casting Lillian Gish in the role of the children’s caretaker, Laughton told the actress about his disappointment in audiences’ lack of attention for movies, how they “slump down with their heads back, or eat candy and popcorn. I want them to sit up straight again,” he said. Though now often ranked among the greatest American movies, “The Night of the Hunter” — released just a few years before Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) made the psychological thriller into a marketable genre — was a commercial flop. Reviews were mixed; The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther called it “a weird and intriguing endeavor.” Years later, Terry Sanders, a second-unit director of the film, wrote that “the rejection by critics and the indifference of audiences hit [Laughton] hard and crushed his spirit. It wasn’t just disappointment he felt, it was utter and deeply debilitating devastation.” He never directed a second movie. — M.H.M.

Willis Alan Ramsey, 73, Loveland, Colo.

Willis Alan Ramsey stands with his hands behind his back wearing a cowboy hat.

The singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey, photographed at Sam’s Town Point bar in Austin, Texas, on March 14, 2024.

Caleb Santiago Alvarado

The singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey, originally from Alabama, released his self-titled debut album in 1972, becoming a forebear of the alt-country genre. Jimmy Buffett and Lyle Lovett became devoted fans. More than 50 years later, Ramsey still hasn’t completed his second album.

I started trying to write songs around 1968. My first song was just awful, but I got better over time. I dropped out of college twice, the second time in 1970, from the University of Texas [at Austin], after discovering a folk club where I became an opening act for $5 a night. Those were golden, halcyon days in Austin filled with sunshine and margaritas and very little traffic. That fall, I left to begin performing at colleges around the country. I was briefly back in Austin to play at U.T. and, somehow, during two days there, I’d managed to play for Gregg Allman and Leon Russell, two of the most influential musicians of that decade. They both gave me their cards and said to look them up if I ever made it their way. [I went to Los Angeles] and recorded a demo at Skyhill, Leon’s personal home studio, and he basically offered me the moon to sign with his new label, Shelter Records [which folded in 1981]. I’d just turned 20. Over the next year, I recorded my first and only album to ever be released [“Willis Alan Ramsey,” often known as the Green Album for its green cover].

I finished the record when I was 21. I was just a kid. Leon gave me my career, to the extent that I’ve had one [but the reason I never released another record was also] Leon’s fault. He told me that if I signed with Shelter, he’d show me the studio and how it worked, and he did. I immediately wanted to learn everything I could about the recording process. I used seven studios and three rhythm sections [to make the record]. I was given carte blanche. The budget was 85 grand. I could do it for 200 grand [now], but I can’t do it any cheaper. I’d need to rehearse every musician. And my songs are all over the place. I get bored doing one particular style.

I’m the most frustrated recording artist you’ve probably ever met in your life. But I still feel I’ll figure something out. I’ve always been optimistic. I’ve got at least three more records of material. I’m pretty tough on myself in terms of writing, and I’m very attached to what I’ve written. I just haven’t been able to get a deal that’d work for me. I mean, the world works, you know? I think the key is just to work with the world. — interview by M.H.M.

Photo assistant: Sergio Flores

Harper Lee, writer, 1926-2016

A portrait of Harper Lee sitting on a rocking chair on a porch smoking a cigarette.

The writer Harper Lee in her hometown, Monroeville, Ala., in 1961, the same year that her debut novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” won the Pulitzer Prize.

Donald Uhrbrock/Getty Images

“I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement,” Harper Lee said in a 1964 radio interview, describing her low expectations for her 1960 debut, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Instead, her novel, about a lawyer in the fictional town of Maycomb, Ala. (a stand-in for the writer’s hometown, Monroeville), who defends a Black man from a false accusation of rape by a white woman, became one of the biggest literary sensations of its era. Lee, who worked as an airline reservations agent in New York for a few years before quitting (with friends’ financial support) to work on her writing, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961; two years later, a film adaptation starring Gregory Peck won three Academy Awards. “To Kill a Mockingbird” would go on to sell tens of millions of copies and become a fixture of high school English classes.

Lee had a hard time with her sudden fame. After that radio interview in 1964, she mostly avoided the press and, as the years and decades passed without a second novel, Lee continued to guard her privacy, albeit regularly attending the Methodist Church in Monroeville and occasionally visiting the local high school during lessons about her work. The year before she died at age 89 in 2016, a previously unknown novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” which had been written before “To Kill a Mockingbird,” appeared to tepid reviews and claims that Lee, by then largely deaf and blind following a stroke, had been manipulated into releasing subpar work. Controversy aside, even just the announcement of a lost novel reignited interest in Lee’s lone masterpiece; at that point, sales of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in trade paperback nearly tripled. — M.H.M.

Luc Tuymans, 65, visual artist

A drawing of a van driving down the street as two people in aprons collect trash cans.

Luc Tuymans, “Mijn Grote Vakantie” (1967).

Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Alex Salinas

When I was 7 or 8, we had to make drawings for school about our summer holidays. I was completely intrigued by the people gathering the garbage outside of our house in Antwerp [Belgium] — their truck, their dress code. During a summer day, I took out my colored pencils. I wrote underneath the drawing, “My Big Vacation.”

It came across as fairly cynical: My big vacation was garbage. It wasn’t meant that way. I really was intrigued by this operation. [Looking at it now] I’m amazed that there’s this perspective already in it. The teacher didn’t believe I made the drawing and took me by the ear to the blackboard to do it again in front of the class.

I’d been bullied a lot as a kid. I was extremely shy. Drawing was a way out, in a sense. I’d draw people who came to visit my parents and, at the end of the year, when exams were done, I’d make drawings for the whole class — whatever they wanted. I always had a ballpoint pen and a piece of paper with me, and people would gather around me while I was drawing, sometimes 20 to 30 of them. The kids were happy to have a drawing, but it didn’t really change the bullying pattern.

I saved most of my [childhood] drawings and gave them to my nephew. Unluckily, he lost them. This is virtually the only one that survived, and I gave it to my wife as a present.

It’s quite interesting to see the size of things — the difference between the houses and the people — and most of all, the idea of space that was already in the drawing. [If I were to redraw this today] it’d be a bit more meticulous, more worked out. But it’s an indication of things that would come later. My skepticism is embedded in this drawing without my doing that consciously — this quite specific, sardonic sense of humor. When I found it again, I had to laugh very, very hard. — J.H.

Do Ho Suh, 62, visual artist

Do Ho Suh, “Tiger Mask” (1971).

This drawing is based on a Japanese anime character, Tiger Mask, that was really popular in the ’70s. Back in those days, Korean TV broadcast Japanese anime in black and white. Everybody at school watched. The character is a pro wrestler who puts on a tiger mask to disguise his identity. I drew the mask directly from the anime. I was probably 9.

Once my friends saw it, they all wanted one. Demand for tiger masks became much greater than supply. Some of the rich kids wanted to trade their Japanese pencils — which had graphics or custom characters on the surface — and colorful erasers for a drawing. My parents couldn’t afford those things, and they weren’t available in Korea. The kids’ parents must have traveled to Japan, which was quite rare back then, and brought them back. [Eventually] I had a box full of those pencils, but I didn’t have the guts to actually use them. The pencils are untouched; the erasers are dried out. For some reason, my mom kept them all these years. — J.H.

Niki Nakayama, 49, chef and Restaurant owner

Tonkatsu is a Japanese home-style staple. It’s a breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet — “ton” means “pork” and “katsu” is a sort of translation of “cutlet” — and it was my absolute favorite food when I was a kid. When my mom made tonkatsu, she’d have my sister and me do the breading, and we really bonded over that. It helped me understand family. We’d set up in the dining room and dredge the cutlets in flour, dip them into the egg wash, cover them with dried breadcrumbs and stack them high on paper plates that we’d bring in to my mother to fry up. Our kitchen had high countertops, and I can remember her standing at the stove in these three-inch platform clogs she’d wear to be a little taller.

I loved seeing how something became something else — it felt like unraveling magic. One day when I was about 9, I came home from school and got the brilliant idea to make my own [but with chicken]. I grabbed some drumsticks from the freezer, did the breading and, while standing on a stool, dipped them in hot oil. (I never admitted this to my mom.) When they turned the color they were supposed to, I was so proud. I bit into one and it was still frozen. That was my first shock of “I can’t believe I didn’t make [this thing] the way I imagined it would be.”

Anytime I was in Japan, especially in my 20s, my friends there would ask what subarashii gochiso, or “the best thing one could possibly eat,” was for me. I’d say tonkatsu, and they’d be like, “What?!,” because it’s such a simple dish — it was like asking for a sandwich. It isn’t the sort of thing I specialize in at my restaurant [N/Naka in Los Angeles], and I don’t have it often anymore because, as I age, I’m trying to eat lighter, but I still associate it with deliciousness and with happiness. Ever since childhood, I’ve thought of food as being about coming together and cooking as an expression of care and love. Having been on the receiving end of that, I do the work that I do to try to make people happy. — K.G.

Marina Abramović, 77, performance artist

A painting of two vehicles crashing into each other.

Marina Abramović, “Truck Accident (I)” (1963).

When I was a teenager in Communist Yugoslavia, there were these ugly green trucks that weighed so much, they often fell over. I started taking photographs of them and trying to paint them at home. But that wasn’t enough for me, so I bought some toy cars and left them on the highway to see if the real trucks would smash them; they were always untouched. I was fascinated by car crashes. Then when I was 17 or 18 years old, I painted the big car smashed and the little car protected — the idea that innocence survives everything.

My mother studied art history, and I was always going to museums. When I was a baby, my first words weren’t “mama” or “papa”; they were “El Greco.” I had my first exhibition at a youth center when I was 14. They mostly had group shows, but I made so much work that I had my own show. I always say I was jealous of Mozart because he started at 5.

I didn’t know then that painting wasn’t my ultimate goal. It takes a long time to realize who you are. I remember the incredible joy of going into my studio — an extra space in my family’s apartment — with my little cup of Turkish coffee. I would be so much in the dream of painting that I’d accidentally drink turpentine instead of the coffee.

Though I wasn’t aware of it [until recently], this crash represents the energy that I’d create in my early performances: two bodies running toward each other, crashing into each other and making this blurry image. My research today is about the body and how to create a field in which you aren’t afraid of pain, of dying, of limits. When you’re young, you don’t see the straight line but, [looking back] it all seems so logical. — J.H.

Deborah Roberts, 61, visual artist

A drawing of a boy resting his chin on his knee.

Deborah Roberts, “James” (1982).

Courtesy of the artist

I used to do a lot of drawings of people at church or kids in the neighborhood. I made this when I was 19, of this boy who came by to play with my brothers. My mother threw most of my drawings away. She had eight children; she couldn’t have all that stuff piling up.

[With that many siblings] you only get attention when you’re sick. But I got a lot of attention for drawing. I was the best artist in my school. The teacher would ask me, “What grade would you want?” I’d say, “I want an A+.” I had a big head. Then I went to the gifted and talented program with high school art students from all over Austin, Texas. I wasn’t the best anymore, but it just made me work harder. That’s where I was first introduced to the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner [one of the first African American painters to achieve international fame, in the early 20th century]. I didn’t even know there were Black artists. We didn’t have the internet or access to museums. We were poor.

I’d ride a small yellow bus to a community college to meet in a special room for the three-hour art class. Eventually, I became the best student in that class, at least in my head. They didn’t ask me what grade I wanted, but I still got an A.

If I were doing it now, I’d blend that hair into the wood better. I wouldn’t have light sources coming from two different areas. But if you look at my collages today, my whole idea’s about seeing people as humans, as children, as vulnerable. I think this is a very vulnerable piece. — J.H.

David Henry Hwang, 66, playwright

David Henry Hwang, manuscript of “Only Three Generations” (1968).

Courtesy of David Henry Hwang. Photo: Lance Brewer

I was about 10 years old, and my maternal grandmother got sick and it looked like she might be close to the end. I remember feeling that that’d be quite tragic — not only would I lose my grandmother but she also happened to be the family historian. I was one of those kids who, for whatever reason, was always really interested in hearing about family history.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but my mom grew up in the Philippines, where my maternal grandparents still lived, so I asked my parents if I could spend a summer there. I went and collected what we’d now call oral histories from my grandmother on cassette tapes, then came back and compiled them into a 60-page family history, “Only Three Generations,” which was [photocopied] and distributed to my family members. Then in the early aughts, someone — my uncle, I think — went and printed two or three dozen copies as a bound version.

I wasn’t someone who felt [that] writing was my calling. I didn’t do another major writing project until I got to college and started writing plays, so I find it interesting that the one time I took on [something] like this was to contextualize myself in a historical framework. That’s consistent with what I’ve done as an adult: sometimes being at sea about who I am and looking at history to gain a sense of self.

The [history] starts with my great-great-grandfather, then the second [part]’s about my great-grandfather and then the third section’s about my grandmother’s generation. I [used] their real names. I think I was trying to be fairly accurate, as opposed to when it later became the basis of my [1996] play “Golden Child.” There’s a lot more liberty taken there. When we did the play on Broadway, my grandmother was still alive and came to see the show. She was supportive of it, but I feel like she liked this version better. — J.A.R.

Ice Spice, wearing a black dress and heels, leans back in a beanbag chair.

Ice Spice wears a Balenciaga jacket, $2,150, balenciaga.com; Norma Kamali dress, $350, normakamali.com; Graff cross necklace, $14,000, graff.com; Alexander McQueen shoes, $1,150, alexandermcqueen.com; stylist’s own tights; and her own jewelry. Photographed at a private home in Los Angeles on Feb. 6, 2024.

Photograph by Shikeith. Styled by Ian Bradley

Name: Ice Spice Profession: Rapper Age: 24

Debuting in: Her first full-length album, “Y2K,” titled after her birth date — Jan. 1, 2000 — which comes out this year.

What she’s excited about: “Going on tour. I can’t wait to see my fans up close and personal and really interact with them — interacting with fans online can be a little overwhelming. All their profile pictures are of me. It feels like a bunch of me’s talking back: It’s weird. Especially when it’s pictures I’ve never seen or don’t remember.”

What she’s nervous about: “I don’t even want to put out that energy. People don’t need to know what I’m nervous about.”

How she works in the studio: “If I was already dressed up and cute, that’d produce a different vibe — but for the most part I like to be really comfortable. I need inspiration around me, too, so I’ll have stacks of money sitting next to the mic. Or I have a bunch of stickers of, like, boobs and butts, stuff like that. They’re drawings, though — I don’t just have porn in my studio.”

How it’s gotten easier since making her EP: “When I was working on [2023’s] ‘Like ..?,’ I was stressed out because I had no idea how the next song was going to come out. Each time, I was like, ‘How am I going to make another song that’s good?’ But then it happened, and then it happened again and again so, after that, I was like, ‘OK, making music is really fun.’ As long as I’m having fun, it’s going to sound fun — and I’m going to be happy with it.” — J.A.R.

Production: Resin Projects. Makeup: Karina Milan at the Wall Group

Mia Katigbak leans forward with her left leg in the air holding a railing with both hands.

Katigbak, photographed at Lincoln Center Theater in Manhattan on Feb. 2, 2024.

Jennifer Livingston

Name: Mia Katigbak Profession: Actress and co-founder of NAATCO Age: 69

Debuting in: Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” (1899), opening this month.

What she’s excited about: “My character, Marina [the central family’s maid], infantilizes everyone. Everything is falling apart around her, but she’s like, ‘Aren’t the old ways better?’ There are a lot of possibilities in that — without getting too metaphorical about the state of Russia, politically and socially.”

What she’s nervous about: “There’s always going to be that common nervousness of ‘I’m going to mess up,’ but somebody brought to my attention that NAATCO [the National Asian American Theatre Company, which was founded in 1989] has done quite a lot of Chekhov; I didn’t even realize it, and I chose all of them. What I find fabulous about Chekhov is that there are sad situations but also human comedy. You have to find the funny if you’re in dire straits, otherwise you’ll slit your wrists.”

How she feels about having her Broadway debut after five decades on the New York stage: “You live long enough, [expletive] happens. I’d kind of figured, ‘Maybe I’m not Broadway material.’ Usually, when Asians get cast, it’s a musical, and I’m not a singer-dancer, so it was never necessarily going to be a goal. I’m a little bit more realistic: I recently got a text [with a photo of the ‘Uncle Vanya’ ad] from a colleague who said, ‘Look at Miss Fancy Pants,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m just a working stiff.’”

How she reinterprets classics: “From the get-go, the point of NAATCO was to ask people to open their vistas in terms of ‘how, what, by whom, for whom’ in theater. We tackled the Western classics first — William Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1600) and Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ (1938) — and my only caveat was not to change them to Asian settings. I remember the first couple of years, maybe decades, people always used to ask, ‘Oh, you’re doing Shakespeare! Are you going to set it in Japan?’ Which isn’t bad, but it’s not the only way to do it. Reception was mixed; there was criticism from both Asian and non-Asian audiences. When we started to do new work — with Michael Golamco’s ‘Cowboy Versus Samurai’ in 2005 — it became a redefinition of what immigrant stories were. Most of the time, the work’s thought of as only one thing, so that was something to figure out. But you can say that about all good theater: It’s asking you to receive something in a different way.” — J.A.R.

Arielle Smith stands with her hands behind her back in the corner of a dance studio.

Smith, photographed at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in the London suburb of Twickenham on Feb. 14, 2024.

Andrea Urbez

Name: Arielle Smith Profession: Choreographer Age: 27

Debuting in: A reimagined “Carmen,” based on the French writer Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella about a Roma woman in southern Spain, which Smith has set instead in Cuba for the version (of the same name) she’s choreographing that premieres at San Francisco Ballet this month.

What she’s excited about: “As a performer, I trained in classical ballet but then went into contemporary dance — the reason I fell out of love with ballet was that the female roles didn’t feel empowering. Not that I needed to be empowered all the time, but every story was dictated by the relationship a woman has to a man. So when Tamara [Rojo, the company’s artistic director] approached me, my first thought was, ‘How could we justify another “Carmen”?’ I wondered how the story would change if one of her lovers was a woman. Musically it’s also not the same — we’ve got a new score from the Mexican Cuban composer Arturo O’Farrill [departing from the French composer Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera], so it’s quite a leap from where it was birthed.”

What she’s nervous about: “I don’t see the point in telling a story again the same way, so that’s one element I’m not nervous about ... but I’m about everything else. The challenge is trying to tell an intimate story in a big space. To make this piece well, it has to move people in some way, and that’s what I’m anxious to get across — for people to feel something.”

How she’s translating the Spanish-set story to Cuba: “Bizet wasn’t Spanish, [so] I thought it’d be more interesting to mainly hear Cuban sounds. I’m Cuban; Tamara’s Spanish; and [the Uruguayan fashion designer] Gabriela Hearst is our costume designer. It’s a full Latinx team, but we’re all different. And this is a universal story that’s not driven by geography. It’s not set on a certain road in Havana but in the soul of these people. I’m not trying to overly examine Cuba. It’s about who I am, as a person who happens to be Cuban, and what my voice contributes.” — J.A.R.

Photo assistant: Callum Su

Pidgeon, photographed at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan on March 10, 2024.

Sean Donnola

Name: Sarah Pidgeon Profession: Actor Age: 27

Debuting in: “Stereophonic,” a new play by David Adjmi with music by Will Butler (formerly of the indie-rock band Arcade Fire), which transfers to Broadway this month following a run at Playwrights Horizons, where it premiered last fall — that production was Pidgeon’s New York stage debut.

What she’s excited about: “This story [about a fictional band’s interpersonal struggles while recording an album in the 1970s] talks about relationships and what one has to sacrifice to make art. New York’s full of artists, and I’m excited to hear what types of conversations people have after seeing the show.”

What she’s nervous about: “The transition to the Golden Theatre. Singing’s so vulnerable. It’s one thing to mess up in front of 200 people, another to mess up in front of four times that many. Off Broadway, we’d have instruments [accidentally] break down halfway through a scene, and we’d have to figure out how to make it feel authentic.”

How she created her character, Diana, one of the band’s lead singers: “Diana’s not looking to other people to give her an example — she’s not following some blueprint. Her band’s waiting for her to make that next great song, and she gets commodified really fast. I can’t say the same for myself, but I’m [also not dealing with being] a woman in [rock in] the 1970s.”

How she settled into the three-hour play’s slowed-down, naturalistic rhythms: “Our director, Daniel Aukin, kept talking about a documentary feel. I think the design of the play — of hearing overlapping conversations — is [very] fly-on-the-wall. Because of its realism, it can evoke the feeling of a film. There’s this sense that it’s not necessarily a performance when we’re doing these shows; it’s not showy. It’s this thrill of being able to keep things private while also recognizing there’re people in the audience two feet away from you. As an actor, you really feel the tension.” — J.A.R.

Hair: Tsuki at Streeters. Makeup: Monica Alvarez at See Management

Olujobi (third from left), at the Public Theater in Manhattan on March 9, 2024, along with (from left) the “Jordans” actor Naomi Lorrain, the director Whitney White and the actors Brontë England-Nelson, Kate Walsh, Ryan Spahn, Toby Onwumere, Meg Steedle, Matthew Russell and Brian Muller.

Video by David Chow

Name: Ife Olujobi Profession: Playwright Age: 29

Debuting in: “Jordans,” her first fully staged production, opening this month at New York’s Public Theater under the direction of Whitney White. The play is about a 20-something woman named Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), the only Black employee at a creative studio, whose office life is upended when her boss hires another Jordan (Toby Onwumere), who’s also Black, to be the company’s director of culture.

What she’s excited about: “For a while, this was that play everybody thought was great but nobody wanted to produce. I thought it’d just be a thing that ends up on the page: It’s such a crazy, visual play that lives in this imaginative space, with a lot of production elements. I’m excited to bring that to life — and have it be people’s introduction to me.”

What she’s nervous about: “Making a play that feels current — in the sense that I started writing it in 2018, did the first reading in 2019 and now we’re in 2024. The play addresses the idea of bringing people of color into a [professional] situation as a trend, not out of any genuine interest in them. It has to do with quote-unquote diversity in the workplace, and it feels like we’ve gone through three different cycles of that conversation since I started writing it. I’m trying to synthesize everything that we’ve been through in the past six years but not feel like I’m shaping the play to respond to these fluctuations.”

How she found her way to playwriting: “I was in the Public’s Emerging Writers Group in 2018, which was my introduction to theater. I was never a theater kid; film was my first love — I’d worked at the Criterion Collection during school and done my thesis in screenwriting. When I graduated [from New York University], I [only] wrote a play to get into the [playwriting] group. I had this experience of being fired three times in a row [after] graduation and felt like I had to express something about being the only Black person entering professional spaces.”

How the play’s surrealist tone came to be: “The main character gets coffee poured on her face in the first scene. For me, that was a big breaking open of the play: ‘This is the kind of world that she’s living in. What else can happen in this world?’ It has what we might call surreal elements, but I don’t always think about it that way because, within this play, everything is real. It’s not a dream.” — J.A.R.

Photo assistant: Serena Nappa. Digital tech: Zachary Smith. Production: Shay Johnson Studio

Kim, photographed at his restaurant, Noksu, in Manhattan on Jan. 15, 2024.

Daniel Terna

Name: Dae Kim Profession: Chef Age: 28

Debuting in: Noksu, the 14-seat tasting counter he’s run since last October below ground in Manhattan’s Herald Square, where he serves Korean-inflected dishes, including grilled mackerel with brown butter and squab with gochujang agrodolce.

What he’s excited about: “I had a feeling, during the pandemic, that something might change — like everyone had to start [again] from zero. Even three-star sous-chefs changed careers: They’ve stopped working in restaurants; they’re selling truffles or doing kitchen shows or TikToks. There was a gap, and I thought if I played up my Asian heritage and my French cooking background, someone would be looking for that. Then I met [the restaurant’s] owners, and they offered me this space in a Koreatown subway station.”

What he’s nervous about: “With restaurants, you prove yourself every day. There’s no tomorrow, no next week. I knew I had to have a tasting menu: I have a personal goal — I’m not telling anyone what it is — and, to reach that level, I think it can only be a tasting menu. I’m not enjoying cooking that much; it’s not a passion. This is my career. I don’t cook at home but, if I think about that goal, it makes me come to the restaurant.”

What he took from working at the New York restaurants Per Se and Silver Apricot: “I really thought, ‘What kind of person am I? What kind of cook? What’s my individualism?’ Working in fine dining is such an honor, but it’s their food. It’s not me. I started focusing on food that would represent who I was.”

How he’s handling everyone’s dietary restrictions: “Right now, we don’t accommodate, because we’re a small kitchen. But sometimes they can push you: If a guest can’t eat dairy, how do you make that sauce creamy without using milk? It requires more work, more thought, more team effort. It’s happened a couple of times, and we just freestyle.” — J.A.R.

Tyla wears an Alexander McQueen jacket $5,990, and shorts, $1,690, alexandermcqueen.com; and Prada shoes, $1,120, prada.com. Photographed at Issue Studio in Los Angeles on March 16, 2024.

Photograph by Shikeith. Styled by Sasha Kelly

Name: Tyla Profession: Singer-songwriter Age: 22

Debuting in: Her first full-length album, “Tyla,” released last month. It’s the product of more than two years of collaboration with writers and producers from around the world — and her first time traveling outside of South Africa (she grew up in Johannesburg). Together, they refined her sound, which she describes as “music that people can dance to: Afrobeats, pop, R&B and amapiano,” the last of which is syncopated electronic music that originated in South Africa in the 2010s.

What she’s excited about: “My first tour. My creative director, Thato Nzimande, and I have been speaking about this forever. I have Coachella coming up and, after sitting for so long with this music and all these ideas, I’m excited to see people’s reactions.”

What she’s nervous about: “I used to be very nervous about performing because all of this is very new and, once something’s on the internet, it’s saved forever. I don’t want to look at it years from now and be cringing . I’m a perfectionist but, as an artist, you’re never going to be happy with everything all the time. That’s something I had to learn — how to let go.”

How she synthesizes South African and American influences: “I love the sound of amapiano production, with the log drum and the shakers and the drops. But I’ve also always wanted to be a chart-topper like Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and now SZA, except I wanted to do it with my sound [her first hit, “Water,” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in October]. Obviously, people believe, ‘Oh, I have to make just pop.’ But that’s boring to me. I want to sell what I know and love.”

Why South African music has global appeal: “People say they can feel it, and that’s cool because we feel it. It’s very spiritual to us; it’s a genre we feel in our bodies. All these amapiano dance moves that everyone does, it’s not even dancers that come up with these moves — it’s just random people, drunk uncles in the corners of clubs. It’s organic, and I think people are looking for that genuine vibe.” — E.L.

Production: Shay Johnson Studio. Hair: Christina “Tina” Trammell. Makeup: Jamal Scott for YSL Beauty

Peck (near center, in a black shirt), photographed at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan on Feb. 27, 2024, along with (top row, from left) the “Illinoise” musicians Kathy Halvorson and Jessica Tsang, the dancer Craig Salstein, the musician Brett Parnell, the dancers Byron Tittle and Christine Flores, the musician Kyra Sims, the dancer Robbie Fairchild, the musician Daniel Freedman, the vocalist Shara Nova, the music arranger and orchestrator Timo Andres and the music director Nathan Koci; (middle row, from left) the vocalist Elijah Lyons, the dancer Ahmad Simmons, the vocalist Tasha Viets-VanLear, the dancers Ricky Ubeda and Kara Chan, the writer Jackie Sibblies Drury and the associate music director Sean Peter Forte; (bottom row, from left) the musician Domenica Fossati and the dancers Jeanette Delgado, Ben Cook, Alejandro Vargas and Rachel Lockhart.

Video by Jason Schmidt

Name: Justin Peck Profession: Director and choreographer Age: 36

Debuting in: “Illinoise,” the first stage musical he’s directing, which opens this month on Broadway after a run last month at the Park Avenue Armory. Based on the singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 indie-folk album, “Illinois,” the show was also conceived and choreographed by Peck, who collaborated on its narrative with the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury.

What he’s excited about: “The ‘Illinois’ song cycle [in which every track relates to the Midwestern state] is one of the great albums of the last 20 years: [Sufjan] didn’t have a recording studio; he’d find a musician up in [New York’s] Washington Heights and record a violin part without realizing what it was going to be part of — he’d run all over, assembling [bits]. I’ve had a long collaboration with him [Peck has based six ballets on Stevens’s music, beginning with “Year of the Rabbit” for New York City Ballet in 2012], so it feels full circle, having discovered that album as a teenager.”

What he’s nervous about: “It’s not a conventional musical; it lives between genres. It’s framed as a gathering around a campfire, being intoxicated by the heat … a campfire beckons storytelling. We enter into the worlds of these people sharing stories on an evening in the wilderness. That’s a difficult thing for managing audience expectations. One of the most challenging parts is trying to tell a full story without words. There are lyrics, but even the lyrics have a sense of poetry to them. They’re not literal.”

How he brought on board his collaborator Jackie Sibblies Drury: “Sufjan was involved early in developing the musical arrangements but has been relatively hands-off [since being diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder, last year] and wasn’t in a place where he wanted to go back to that time in his life. I needed a storytelling partner. Jackie told me how much she loved the album; when she moved to Chicago, she and her then boyfriend listened to it on the road there. A lot of these songs resonated with both of us at a coming-of-age time in our lives, and that’s part of our approach: intimate and personal.” — J.A.R.

Production: Shay Johnson Studio. Photo assistants: Shinobu Mochizuki, Tom Rauner. Digital tech: Kyle Knodell

Stella, photographed at Percy Priest Lake Park in Nashville on March 7, 2024.

Stacy Kranitz

Name: Maisy Stella Profession: Actress and singer Age: 20

Debuting in: “My Old Ass,” a coming-of-age comedy in which her character, Elliott, a young woman leaving her small Canadian hometown for college, meets her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza, while tripping on mushrooms. In theaters this August, it’s Stella’s first movie — and her first acting project since spending much of the past decade on the TV series “Nashville” (2012-18), in which she played a country star’s singer daughter.

What she’s excited about: “Being reintroduced in a way that feels true to me. I was a baby when ‘Nashville’ started; it’s hard to have people see you as a character for so many years. You have to be careful with the next thing you do, especially after you take a break [to finish high school], and I wanted to be represented in a way that felt genuine and pushed me in the direction I wanted to go. I thought a project like this would come 10 years down the line, if ever.”

What she’s nervous about: “I think I confuse anticipation with anxiety. I just feel general anticipation all the time, whether it’s about a date this weekend or this movie coming out; it’s that feeling that something’s about to happen. In my body, I might confuse it with nerves, but there are happy and cozy feelings, as well, so it levels out.”

How she collaborated with the writer-director Megan Park on her dialogue: “I watch a lot of young adult shows and think, ‘Oh my God, we sound so dumb. We don’t talk like that.’ Not everything’s abbreviated and slang. Megan [who’s 37] knows how to write for Gen Z because she includes us in her process. She doesn’t have an ego and molds her characters to who’s playing them. We’d do scripted takes and then ‘fun runs,’ where we got to improv, and she’d add lines in the moment.”

What was it like creating the template for Plaza’s character: “You’d think Aubrey would’ve come first, but I was the first one attached to the film. In any other situation, it’d be me matching her, but I feel like Elliott is very similar to me so, when Aubrey and I met, I could feel her filming me with her eyes, trying to get a scope.” — J.A.R.

Hair and makeup: Laura Godwin

Lakota-Lynch (bottom row, in a white T-shirt), photographed at Open Jar Studios in Manhattan on Feb. 26, 2024, along with (top row, from left) the “Outsiders” composer Zach Chance, the choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman and the writer and composer Justin Levine; (middle row, from left) the actors Brent Comer, Jason Schmidt, Joshua Boone, Kevin William Paul and Dan Berry; (bottom row, from left) the actors Emma Pittman and Brody Grant, the director Danya Taymor, the writer Adam Rapp and the actor Daryl Tofa.

Justin French

Name: Sky Lakota-Lynch Profession: Actor Age: 32

Debuting in: “The Outsiders,” a new musical that opened this month and is based on S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel about rival teen gangs. Lakota-Lynch plays Johnny Cade, a shy 16-year-old from an abusive home. He appeared in “Dear Evan Hansen” in 2018, but this is his first time originating a role on Broadway.

What he’s excited about: “I’ve been with the show for six years, and it finally feels fully baked. People are going to be expecting us to come out tap-dancing, but you have [the writer] Adam Rapp and [the director] Danya Taymor, and those people have never done a musical. It’s the ultimate place for an actor-singer. It’s truly a play with music [by Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay of the folk duo Jamestown Revival, and the songwriter Justin Levine], and I think it’s going to shock people.”

What he’s nervous about: “It’s going to be sad to eventually let Johnny go. I’m doing this on Broadway, but it’s like the period at the end of the sentence.”

The actor sings a snippet of James Taylor’s 1970 song “Fire and Rain.”

Video by Jordan Taylor Fuller

How he’s approaching playing a beloved character: “Johnny doesn’t have a lot of lines: He’s like an Edward Scissorhands [type] — I have to fill the space with energy. The cool thing about playing the character is that I got to imbue him with myself. I’m Native American and Black, and the story is set in Tulsa, Okla., where that’s [not uncommon]. My costume has Native American embroidery; my version of Johnny feels fully fleshed out. Of course, I stole things from Ralph [Macchio, who played the role in the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film] and from the novel — it’s that fine line between tough and tender, but it’s tailored to me.” — J.A.R.

Production: Shay Johnson Studio. Photo assistant: Shen Williams-Cohen

Becoming a Character

The comedian and actress Meg Stalter, photographed at Smashbox Studios in Los Angeles on Jan. 24, 2024, tests a few moods in front of the camera.

Photographs by Shikeith. Styled by Delphine Danhier

The comedian and actress Meg Stalter, 33, started gaining attention on social media during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns when she posted absurd short-form videos playing different personae, like a Disney World team leader conducting an employee orientation. The following year, she had her TV debut on HBO’s “Hacks” as Kayla, a less than helpful assistant to a talent agent. Now she’s filming her first lead role on the new Netflix series “Too Much,” written and directed by Lena Dunham (and loosely based on Dunham’s life), in which she plays the workaholic Jessica, who responds to a breakup by moving to London.

I took so many improv classes when I first [was] doing comedy. It’s the starting point for me when I develop characters. During the pandemic, I’d do improv on Instagram Live every night. The theme would be “We’re going to Paris” or “We’re doing a women’s exercise class.” It was just me doing improv online by myself for hours. When I take on a role, I study the script and imagine if I had to improv a scene. “What would I add or take away? How’s this person different from me? What could I give to the character of my own personality?”

When I read the part of Kayla, I’d already met Paul [W. Downs, a co-creator of “Hacks”] at a stand-up show. [I found out later that] he had me in mind when he wrote the script. That was almost more nerve-racking: It was strange to think, “What if I lose this part to someone else but they were thinking of me in the first place?”

Kayla started as the assistant who comes in and says a crazy line. But in the third season of “Hacks,” she has more emotional scenes, which add another layer: When a character experiences a range of emotions, it makes the crazy stuff even funnier.

The comedian and actress tells a knock-knock joke.

At first when you get a script, you picture yourself in it and think, “Oh, well, she probably looks like me.” That changes the more you get to know the character. Lena [Dunham]’s been so open to talking through Jessica. She’ll say, “Tell me what you think about the hair,” and, “Tell me if there’re any outfits you don’t like.” She even made a playlist Jessica would listen to. There’s Avril Lavigne, Girlpool, Sabrina Carpenter. When I’m studying the script, I’ll play that in the background. Jessica’s into the dreamy side of London and Jane Austen. She’s a little girlie and wears a lot of pink. She wears [nightgowns] as actual dresses and things that’re a little bit too cute for work. I sent [the costume designer] Arielle [Cooper-Lethem] some dresses from Fashion Brand Company. They look like [they could be in an Austen adaptation] but modern and sexier. Like shirts with ribbons all over or matching sets made of lace. Everything’s kind of funny but also hot. It’s stuff I would’ve worn when I thought I was straight. I feel like Jessica’s the straight version of me.

It’s interesting to be playing a version of someone whose work I’ve admired for so long. I’ve rewatched [Dunham’s 2012-17 HBO series] “Girls” so many times. To have everything she’s written in my head but be told, “Just do it the way that you would do,” or, “This is all yours now,” it feels freeing. There’re some directors and writers who want you to say exactly what’s on paper.

When you’re in character in front of a camera, there’re certain things you can’t prepare for. I can research so much for a part — create memories for the character, talk through costume — but if it comes out differently [than what I imagined], that’s OK. It’s important to be able to let go and let the scene be what it is. Some people torture themselves after performing. They’re like, “I should’ve said this or that.” I really don’t do that. Once it’s out there, that’s what it’s supposed to be.

Stalter wears, from start: Versace dress, $1,990, versace.com ; and Alexander McQueen ring, $690, alexandermcqueen.com . Versace dress and headband, $325. Wray shirt, $185, wray.nyc ; Dolce & Gabbana dress, $2,095, dolcegabbana.com ; and Sophie Buhai earrings, $395, ssense.com .

Production: Resin Projects. Hair: Tiago Goya. Makeup: Holly Silius. Manicure: Pilar Lafargue

Making a Painting

The artist Roberto Gil de Montes, photographed at his studio in La Peñita, Mexico, on Feb. 13, 2024, painting “Man With Lizard Mask.”

Photographs by Nuria Lagarde

Since 2005, the painter Roberto Gil de Montes, 73, has lived and worked in the fishing village of La Peñita de Jaltemba north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast of Mexico. He was born in Guadalajara but moved as a teenager to Los Angeles, where he was active in the Chicano art movement. It wasn’t until he took part in the 2020 show “Siembra” at the gallery Kurimanzutto in Mexico City, though, that the art world took notice of his dreamlike Surrealist works. Next year, Gil de Montes will be the subject of a career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

I live in a place where there’re no museums or galleries. I’m inspired by my surroundings — by the jungle, by the ocean. I often say there’s no better background than the ocean for painting. I have two studios: one at home, where I work on paper, and a painting studio in town near the ocean. Usually, I start at home on paper. I either sketch or use watercolor wash. If I’m going to do an oil painting, I go to the studio in town. Before I work, I might just sit around and look at books — I like [monographs about Henri] Matisse, [Paul] Cezanne, [Edouard] Manet. It’s sort of a meditation. A lot of times, an idea surges when I’m working on something already; other times, it might be a memory. Or a dream. The other day, I had a dream that I was taking a photo with my phone of a house on fire — but I was conscious that the house was a drawing. [When I woke up] I thought, “Well, I should do a painting of that.”

I’m very intrigued by how memory works and how the memory of something can trigger [a new idea]. [While putting together the career survey] I’ve revisited all of these old works of mine. Some I remember painting. Others I don’t remember at all. I’m 73 years old. I forget things, and then I start thinking, “Wow, this is interesting because if I’m working from memory and forgetting things, how’s that going to affect the work that I do? How can I explore that?” For instance, somebody sent me a painting they said was mine. I said, “No, I didn’t do that painting. I’m sorry,” only to find out that I’d signed the back. A lot of the ideas I’ve been working on come from the past. In the [2022] Venice Biennale, I had a painting [“Up,” 2021] of somebody hanging upside down or falling through the sky. That came [about] when I walked into the studio and noticed I had inadvertently put a painting upside down. I said, “Actually, that’ll make a good painting upside down.” I don’t know how other artists work. I’m very open to ideas.

Reimagining a Retrospective

The conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, photographed at her studio in upstate New York on Feb. 6, 2024, with LED text from her series “Survival” (1983-85), which will be on view at her exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from May through September.

In 1989, the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer installed an LED scroll of aphorisms — “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” is among the most famous — on three of the six internal ramps of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It was part of her retrospective “Untitled (Selections From Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, the Living Series, the Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments and Child Text).” Next month, Holzer, 73, will restage the work there as part of her show “Jenny Holzer: Light Line” (which will also include other pieces from her 50-plus-year career). But this time, the LED installation — which will display the original “Truisms” and other text series — will go all the way to the top.

I’m a self-loathing, slow study so [ahead of the 1989 retrospective at the Guggenheim] I had to walk and walk around and around and around the museum. It finally occurred to me, “Oh, around and around is the answer [to how the piece should be displayed].” I’m relieved I attended to what Frank Lloyd Wright did: The building is magnificently, utterly self-sufficient. It doesn’t necessarily need art, and it’s inclined to shrug it off at times.

As I was developing the new exhibition, I started walking the museum again — and not just the ramps. I went up and down the stairs a few thousand times. I went in the elevator, in assorted bathrooms, in nooks and crannies. And in those places, I put everything from the first diagrams I made in the ’70s on up to icky paintings made by A.I.

The conceptual artist discusses a sculpture by the artist Louise Bourgeois.

Video by Joshua Charow

If I have a specialty, and I’m not certain that I do, it’s installation. I like hunting and seeing. The first step is to go blank, with no preconceptions. And then, since it is visual art, using my eyes to see. Then that mysterious thing happens: Ideas come — when you’re lucky. Otherwise, you try again.

When I’m just trying to make a new artwork for anywhere, it’s adequate to lie on the couch with my eyes closed and wait for that pizza to arrive — the “art” pizza. But when I’m [fortunate enough] to be in a building like Wright’s Guggenheim, it’s — surprise, surprise — necessary for the body to be in the space. Alert, alive, all tentacles reaching out, all senses going. And on some level, being hopeful.

Photo assistant: Ece Yavuz

Adapting an Ibsen Play

For the second time, the playwright Amy Herzog, 45, has adapted a work by Henrik Ibsen. The first was “A Doll’s House” (1879), starring Jessica Chastain. Herzog’s latest staging, “An Enemy of the People” (1882), stars Jeremy Strong as Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a physician who is shunned for warning his town that its lucrative public baths are contaminated. Michael Imperioli plays his brother, Peter Stockmann, the mayor, who seeks to suppress Thomas’s findings.

When I begin an adaptation, I first read a few different translations of the play. Then I try to get those out of my head. For “A Doll’s House” and now “An Enemy of the People,” I’ve worked with a translator named Charlotte Barslund. She does a literal translation in English, which stays as close to the feeling and meaning of the original Norwegian as possible. I go through that line by line, translating it into my own words without making any big decisions. Once I have my first version, I start the bigger work of cutting. For “An Enemy of the People,” we cut three characters. I decided to cut the character of Katherine, Thomas Stockmann’s wife, after a lot of conversations with Sam [Gold, the play’s director and Herzog’s husband]. Her sections weren’t working; they were feeling really turgid. There’re sections that his daughter, Petra [played by Victoria Pedretti], could pick up if Katherine was gone.

What was remarkable about cutting Katherine was realizing how little had to change. The fact that you didn’t have to do major surgery on the play was one tell that cutting Katherine was a good idea. It gives Stockmann this recent terrible grief. It’s a particular grief when you’re a doctor, I think, to lose a spouse — to be the doctor who can’t save your loved ones. That spring loads the play as it begins: He’s reaching a place where he can have happiness again — [only] to be completely betrayed by his community and to lose everything he’s finally gained.

Ibsen wrote domestic psychological plays and social plays. “A Doll’s House” is the former and “An Enemy of the People” the latter. [When adapting “A Doll’s House”] I learned some pretty basic things about the mechanics of making it feel leaner and more modern. But other than that, it was shockingly different to translate them and humbling that he had plays that were so totally different inside of him. This play is bigger and rangier and even more relevant than “A Doll’s House.” It’s very timely — there’re a few headlines it brings up. One is climate change. I was reading a lot about scientists who weren’t listened to when they tried to sound the alarm years ago. I was also reading Naomi Klein’s [2023 memoir] “Doppelganger” and thinking about the way the body politic becomes sick. I try to do a lot of research before writing — I read a fair amount of Ibsen biographies — so there’s no single influence that’s too loud while I’m working. When I’m really doing the translation, I need quiet and cloistering. So there’d be gaps in my communication with [Jeremy] and everyone else. Then there’d be the moments, after reading a draft, when it was time to talk and become porous again.

Jeremy was the reason for the production. From the moment I began to work on “An Enemy of the People,” I knew who was playing Thomas Stockmann. I’ve known Jeremy since 1997, and I’ve seen a ton of his work, so his voice was influencing the way I adapted that character.

[Jeremy and Dr. Stockmann] are similar in that they both have a total commitment to what they believe in. Having someone in my life with that kind of devotion to his craft and to his storytelling means that I’m coming to [the character] with the texture of a real, contemporary person. Every few days, he sends me a poem or an article or something that’s meant something to him related to the play. He sent me the William Butler Yeats poem “A Coat.” The first three lines are “I made my song a coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies.” There’s this incidental line in Ibsen’s original [script] that people often cut — but I didn’t, I love it — when Captain Horster [Dr. Stockmann’s loyal friend] makes his first entrance before you even see Dr. Stockmann, who says, “Hang your coat on that peg. Oh, you don’t wear an overcoat?” Captain Horster is this character who has no pretense and is an uncorrupted type of human. And Ibsen has him coatless at the beginning. So the idea of a coat and what it is to cover yourself has become an interesting thematic touch point for us.

Putting Up a Gallery Show

Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, the visual artist Joe Bradley, 49, has made a habit of reinvention. His style continuously shifts, from mixed-media sculptures to line drawings to highly saturated large-scale canvases. His most recent exhibition of paintings opens this month at David Zwirner gallery in New York.

I tend to arrive at my studio [in Long Island City, Queens] around nine, turn the lights on, make a pot of coffee. Then, depending on what sort of stage the paintings are at, I’ll just start working. If it’s early on [in the piece], I’m much more active. When the paintings [begin] to come together, it’s a lot more about just looking and making little decisions to resolve things. I don’t have a real ritual. I don’t even have to be in any particular state of mind. If I’m distracted or depressed or happy or whatever, I just come in and see what happens.

I do begin with some practical decisions. I know how big the painting is going to be and what sort of surface I’m going to be working on. I know what the contour of [a show] will look like. I don’t make any sort of preparatory sketches — the paintings reveal themselves to me through the process of working on them. But the deadline [for the show] ends up being this organizing force. It’s the day your entire year revolves around, the time [by which] you know the paintings will have to be presentable and cohesive. It’s helpful to have that because, otherwise, you could keep things up in the air indefinitely.

When I paint today, I might be responding to a mark on the canvas that I made six weeks or six months ago. What I’m doing early in the process isn’t going to be available visually by the end — most of it’ll be painted out or it’ll disappear in the process. I lay traps or create little problems for myself to encounter. It’s almost like the uglier it gets in the early stages, the better the painting will be.

Building an Installation

Suzanne Jackson sits on a bucket assembling a sculptural work involving paper or plastic and wire mesh.

The artist Suzanne Jackson, photographed at her Savannah, Ga., studio on Feb. 1, 2024, works on a piece that will eventually be installed on a terrace at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Kendrick Brinson

The Savannah, Ga.-based artist Suzanne Jackson, 80, has worked as a dancer, a set and costume designer, a professor and a poet — but most notably as a painter. Jackson describes her ethereal compositions as “anti-canvases,” which she creates by building up layers of acrylic paint and at times found materials, including netting and produce bags. In 2025, she’ll display a selection of work from her six-decade career, along with a new site-specific installation, as part of a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

I’m working on a commission for the fourth-floor terrace of [SFMoMA]. It’s an installation that’ll climb the walls of the terrace and partially fill the open space. My approach is quite different than if I were working on a painting in my studio: I have to think of it in an architectural or sculptural sense. There’re technical aspects, so I’ve been doing a lot of research in airports and from airplane windows, looking at large-scale structures that don’t fall down — things on the rooftops of buildings like windsocks or poles. This piece will be built from the ground up, unlike my other work that hangs from the walls or ceiling.

I don’t go looking for ideas. I just go into the studio and start painting. Now that I’m older and not teaching, I don’t have to do anything except paint. In the morning, I roam around the house. I do the laundry. I feed the cats. I look out the window and stare at nature. I have a big window at the end of my kitchen and can see tall trees and birds and animals and insects. I go through the studio to get to the kitchen from my bedroom, so sometimes I end up stopping and looking at work I’ve already done. There’s a lot of sitting and thinking and looking. Sometimes, I’ll turn on music — Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy or Yo-Yo Ma. On Mondays and Fridays, it’s [the Savannah radio D.J. and jazz historian] Ike Carter’s show “Impressions.”

As the music flows, so does the paint — that’s a spiritual environment to be in. Other times, I’ll work in absolute silence. At the beginning, I explore. I’m never quite sure what’s going to happen. Usually, it comes spontaneously. One brushstroke leads to the next, and then it becomes another idea. I might think I have one idea when I start, but it often changes along the way to be something completely opposite. I’m just having a good time being a painter. That’s how I started, and it’s how I’m going to end.

Photo assistant: Dayna Anderson

Lorraine O’Grady,

89, new york city.

The multidisciplinary artist and critic, whose solo show at Mariane Ibrahim gallery in Chicago opens this month.

A suit of armor with a spiky helmet and a raised sword.

Lorraine O’Grady’s “Announcement Card 2 (Spike With Sword, Fighting)” (2020).

I thought I was going to be a writer. My family tells me that I made my first poem when I was a year and a half old: “I like mice because they’re nice.” [In my early 30s, after working for five years] as an intelligence analyst, I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction. I hadn’t really been reading fiction, though, so I wasn’t very good at writing it. I spent most of my second year there translating short stories written by my instructor [the Chilean novelist] José Donoso.

Growing up, I had all these exposures to beauty. I’d gone to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a child and seen [Paul] Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” a painting that continues to influence me. And my mother was a dress designer. She redid our house every six months. By the time I was 10, I basically had everything that I’m now working with in place, but I didn’t have the language. I didn’t get that language until the early 1970s, when I read [the critic and curator] Lucy Lippard’s “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972.” [Then] I was ready. The ideas for my visual art already existed within my experience. I just hadn’t known they were art before.

A few years later, when I was in my early 40s, I had to have a biopsy of my breast. After — thank God, it was negative for cancer — I was thinking about what I could give my doctor as a thank-you present. Reading my copy of the Sunday New York Times, I saw a line in the sports pages about Julius Erving that said, “The doctor is operating again.” I said, “OK, this could be the start of something,” and I made a really good poem for my doctor [out of words clipped from the newspaper]. But when I finished the poem, I said, “This is too good to give to him.” Then I immediately started making newspaper poems for a project called “Cutting Out The New York Times.” I made one every week for 26 weeks. When I finished, I realized that I’d become a visual artist — or revealed that I was a visual artist. — interview by J.C.

Toni Morrison,

The author of 11 novels, including “Beloved,” “Sula” and “Song of Solomon.”

By the time Toni Morrison wrote “Beloved” (1987), her best-known novel, she’d worked for nearly two decades as a book editor. Her debut, “The Bluest Eye” (1970), was published when she was 39 and, while not a commercial success, was critically praised. She published three more books between 1973 and 1981 — including “Song of Solomon” — while still at her editing job.

Prior to going into publishing, Morrison — who had a master’s degree in American literature from Cornell University — spent nearly a decade teaching college English. After her divorce, she worked for a textbook division of Random House before joining Random House proper as its first Black female editor; there, she championed and published Black authors such as Angela Davis, June Jordan, Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara. “I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything,” she once said about the civil rights movement. “But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line.” All the while, Morrison was waking by dawn to write before heading into the office. She’d later describe those sessions as a form of liberation: “The writing was the real freedom because nobody told me what to do there. That was my world and my imagination. And all my life it’s been that way.”

For many years, Morrison considered her day job essential to her art. “I thrive on the urgency that doing more than one thing provides,” she once said. But the industry had its difficulties — the overwhelming whiteness, the increasing commercial demands — and she left her position in 1983. Four years later, at age 56, she published “Beloved.” In a preface to the 2004 edition of the book, she looks back on the rush of feelings she experienced following her last day at the job. “I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty. Enter ‘Beloved.’”

65, New York City

The multidisciplinary artist and former drag performer, whose paintings are currently on view at the Dallas Contemporary art space and the MassArt Art Museum in Boston.

A floral painting with a purple background.

A 2023 acrylic on canvas by Tabboo! titled “Lavender Garden.”

My mother put me into an art class when I was 15 at the Worcester Art Museum, and then I went on to art school [at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design], where I majored in painting and fine art. I remember my first sale, to my aunt Julie. She wanted me to copy [Jean-François] Millet’s “The Gleaners.” I didn’t want to copy someone else’s stuff — I think one of the reasons I’m popular is that I’m very original — but I still did the painting, of course. It was a commission and I was being paid!

I started performing drag in nightclubs when I moved to New York in 1982, but I’ve always been painting, too. This isn’t something I just came up with, like, “Oh, I can’t get on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ I better start painting.” I had one-man shows and gallery exhibitions right after graduating from art school. Elton John and Gianni Versace bought my paintings. I don’t want anyone to have the impression — which certain people seem to — that I took up painting just because I stopped doing drag. I might be getting a bit more attention for it now, but I’ve always been doing it.

I usually get up at four in the morning. I feed my cat and then start painting. A lot of my paintings are sunrises. And I do sunsets and cityscapes. Or if it rains in a weird way, I’ll do a rain painting. It’s a very spiritual, meditative, private thing. There isn’t a day that goes by that I haven’t done something, and so my work gets better and better and better. And I must say, I’m a master of my craft now.

Sometimes a collector will ask, “Can we come over to the studio and watch you paint?” I tell them no. I usually do it naked. — interview by J.C.

Justin Vivian Bond,

60, new york city and the hudson valley, n.y..

The performer and multidisciplinary artist, whose work has been exhibited at Participant Inc. and the New Museum in New York City, and will be on view at Bill Arning Exhibitions in Kinderhook, N.Y., in May.

Justin Vivian Bond’s watercolor “Witch Eyes, by Viv, to Protect You From Evil Chodes: Lois” (2024).

When I was in high school, I was interested in visual art as well as music and acting, but I decided to major in theater in college because I thought it was a career that could get me out of Maryland and allow me to move to New York. I became a performer, and I’ve been doing cabaret for many years. In 2008, when I broke up my cabaret act Kiki and Herb, my rent was so cheap that I didn’t have to work as much. I started painting again, and it flows very naturally for me.

My watercolors are primarily portraits of people I know. I’ll ask them to pose for a photograph and then paint from that. I also make pseudo fan art, like my “Witch Eyes” series, which is based on iconic photographs of celebrities’ eyes. The wonderful thing about painting is that you have total control over it, if you’re lucky. Onstage, there’re so many variables. And with painting, you don’t have to be there [when people see your work]. I love being in front of an audience, but I don’t really love being among people. The pleasure for me is singing but, when the show’s over, I have to talk to a lot of people. I like all of them, but there’re too many, so it can be a little overwhelming. You don’t ever get to connect on a deeper level. The most satisfying times in my life have been when my shows have been installed and it’s the night before the opening. All of it’s exactly how I want it — the room, the lighting — and I just sit there and look and have this sense of utter satisfaction. — interview by J.C.

Wallace Stevens,

The poet, whose best known works include “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “The Snow Man” and “Anecdote of the Jar.”

Wallace Stevens never quit his day job. Though he had literary ambitions as a young man, serving as the editor of the Harvard Advocate as an undergraduate, he earned his degree from New York Law School and in 1916 joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained, specializing in surety and fidelity claims, until his death, in 1955. Yet he was writing all the time: on his daily walk to work, at home in the evenings and sometimes in the office.

It wasn’t until 1914, when Stevens was 34, that his first post-college poems appeared in literary journals. He went on to publish seven volumes of poetry over the course of his lifetime. The first, “Harmonium,” released in 1923, sold fewer than 100 copies; the last, 1954’s “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,” won the Pulitzer Prize.

The themes of Stevens’s work — the affirming power of art and beauty, the sublime contained within the mundane — suggest one reason why he stuck with insurance law even as his artistic acclaim grew. His steady paycheck would have allowed writing to remain a purely creative act. In his essay “Surety and Fidelity Claims,” Stevens says of his insurance work, “You sign a lot of drafts. You see surprisingly few people. ... You don’t even see the country; you see law offices and hotel rooms.” Poetry, on the other hand — as he characterizes it in 1923’s “Of Modern Poetry” — “must be the finding of a satisfaction.” It was his livelihood, in the most artistic sense of the word.

Theaster Gates,

50, chicago.

The University of Chicago professor and multidisciplinary artist, whose solo shows at the Gagosian gallery in Le Bourget, France, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo open this month.

A sculpture resembling a piano covered with white metal.

Theaster Gates’s sculptural work “Sweet Sanctuary, Your Embrace” (2023).

In 2000, I took a job as the arts planner at the Chicago Transit Authority. There was so much new construction happening there, and my role was to appeal to the Federal Transit Administration for a portion of the transit money to be set aside for public art. In a way, it was like an M.B.A.: I managed $26 million over four or five years. My negotiating skills went through the roof.

I’d graduated from Iowa State [in 1995] with a degree in community and regional planning and then did a [post-baccalaureate] in religious studies and fine art at the University of Cape Town. After that, I spent time in Japan studying ceramics. So when I came to the C.T.A., my background incorporated both art and community and, every day, I was leaving there and going to my ceramics studio.

In 2005, I left the C.T.A. because I outgrew the position, and I stopped making pots because I couldn’t afford my studio. I started using more recycled materials in my work [such as wood pallets]. It was during this period that I was starting to combine my knowledge of minimalism and conceptual practices with my background in building and working with my dad, who was a roofer. Now buildings have kind of become my primary monuments, and the project management and team building that I learned at the C.T.A. are really evident in the way that I create.

I did a project at the New Museum [that opened in late 2022 and] was essentially an exhibition about mourning and loss. My father had died six months prior to the opening, and I didn’t have time to mourn his death or the deaths of dear friends like [the fashion designer] Virgil Abloh, my mentor [the Nigerian curator and art critic] Okwui Enwezor, [the author] bell hooks and [the film scholar] Robert Bird. The show grew out of a desire to grapple with my feelings and honor these people. The museum didn’t necessarily have the budget to do all of the things that I wanted to, so I had to figure out, “Are there poetic ways to articulate loss that don’t require substantial build-out, or big, fancy gestures or expensive audio equipment?”

Ultimately, I included Bird’s 9,500-volume library, and Virgil Abloh’s widow loaned me his yellow diamond-studded necklace. Those were moments when limitations built new friendships and more nuanced opportunities, and I feel like having been a planner’s what made me willing to pick up the phone and say, “Hey, would you be willing to collaborate with me?” — interview by J.C.

Remember That You’re Never Truly Equipped to Start Anything

As actors, we feel like we have to be ready, but I’d say you’re never ready. You’re not prepared for something you’ve never done before, so let go of that. This past year I did some symphony gigs for the first time, and it was incredible. It was better than being ready, because I just had to be new. — Ali Stroker, 36, actress and singer

Myha'la stands outside under a dim sky wearing a hoodie.

Myha’la in season one of “Industry,” 2020.

Amanda Searle/HBO

Embrace Fear — but Come Prepared

I have the curse of perfectionism, and there’ve been so many projects where I’ve said, “I’m not right for that, so I’m not going to audition.” But that’s kind of lazy, so I’ve rewired my thinking: If something’s targeting some insecurity in me, why not take the opportunity to work on that thing? I used to avoid anything with an accent but now, if I got the call for “Bridgerton,” I’d feel confident enough to go for it. Definitely do your homework, though. With almost every trading scene in “Industry,” I’ve thought, “Nope, I’m not going to be able to get the words out.” I don’t sleep the night before, and I’m wrecked the next morning. Then everything pours out because I’ve come in prepared. Filming the first season of “Industry” in 2019 was the first time I’d been on a job longer than five days, the first time I’d worked out of the country, the first everything, and I was so nervous. Go toward things that scare you. — Myha’la, 28, actor

Make Yourself Start

Deciding what’s a good idea is an ongoing battle. But you can only think about something for so long before you just have to try it. Someone once told me that when he makes a painting he likes, he’ll make another one with the same idea to see if it holds up and then another, which I thought was pretty good advice. Sometimes I force myself to go to my studio and start painting [Gordon initially set out to be a visual artist and started focusing more on her art practice about 25 years ago], even if I don’t have an idea. I like conceptual thinking, but I also like the physicality of painting. Usually that leads me to something and, even if it doesn’t — what am I going to do, sit around and watch movies all day? — Kim Gordon, 70, musician and visual artist

Put Yourself in Your Body — and Your Past

Sometimes painting can feel like this dream I have where I’m in the back of a moving car and I’m reaching over to the front seat to try to get control. That’s a nervous system in panic. There’s a grounding exercise I like to do where I jump and really feel my feet smack the floor — trying to get yourself back into your body’s part of the trick. And then I go, “Well, who’s dreaming?” If you can get there, you’re lucid in the dream, and that’s a good place to be. Still, feelings will come up that you don’t want. When I was working on this satyr painting, suddenly the satyr was my old friend Chris, who betrayed me when I was 18 to a group of guys who beat me up. I thought, “Why am I painting Chris? I don’t want to paint Chris.” I was in flow for a while but, when I hit this painting, I experienced self-doubt and thought, “People are going to think these paintings are awful.” Then I went on Instagram and liked one of his pictures. It felt like a weird, brave task. And he wrote to me and asked if he could call me, 26 years after ghosting me, and he apologized for 20 minutes. I cried and I think he probably cried, and I felt it all melt away. And then I went back to the painting. — TM Davy, 43, artist

Kim Gordon, wearing a floral jumpsuit, poses in front of a red background and extends her left hand.

Kim Gordon in 1990.

Laura Levine/Corbis via Getty Images

Psych Yourself Out

If things are too hard, something’s wrong, but you also have to embrace the awkward feelings. See if you can fool yourself — I used to get self-conscious about drawing when I was a teenager in an art class with a model, and the teacher said, “Don’t think of it as drawing. Think of it as designing the page.” That really loosened things up for me. It’s amazing what you can do if you pretend. — Kim Gordon

When people say they’re self-taught, it means they asked somebody else how they did it. When I began in folk music, I went to the clubs and I begged and borrowed and asked. [More recently, having taken up painting acrylics a little over a decade ago,] I was painting [Anthony] Fauci and couldn’t figure out how to do his glasses. I called an artist friend and she had all these tricks — “Don’t try to copy the photograph,” she told me, “just use dabs of paint here and there to give the impression of glass.” It didn’t take more than 45 minutes to learn how to put glasses on Fauci. Without her, I would’ve struggled for weeks trying to get it right. — Joan Baez, 83, singer-songwriter, activist, painter and author

Don’t Sweat the End — and Work on More Than One Thing at Once

Remember that the maker almost never knows exactly what they’re making in advance. The great works often appear when we’re aiming toward something completely different. Start as soon as you see a way in. I [also] find it helpful to work on multiple things at the same time. Not in the same moment but during the same general time period. The beauty is that different projects are at different stages, so you can avoid getting burned out on any one [thing]. We can step away, work on something else and come back with new eyes, as if we’re seeing it for the first time. Tunnel vision’s easy to fall into when working on a single project for a long period. We can end up getting lost in details nobody else will ever notice, while losing touch with the grand gesture of the work. — Rick Rubin, 61, music producer and author of “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”

Murray Hill in 1996.

Catherine McGann/Getty Images

Treat Procrastination as Productivity

There were certain things I couldn’t do during the [SAG-AFTRA] strike, but I did get a book deal. It’s called “Showbiz! My Unexpected Life as a Middle-Aged Man,” and I’ve got to get that done — by June 1st! I’m used to being onstage. When I’m sitting at my desk in my studio apartment, I procrastinate quite a bit, and I’m always asking myself, “Is this part of the creative process for me, or am I just making my life harder?” But I also procrastinate in productive ways. I go for a walk — in rehab, they taught us, “Move a muscle, change a thought.” Then I come back and put on jazz music. Doing that removes the blocks, probably because jazz is so much about improvisation and I’m at my core an improviser. Another thing I’ll do to light the match is turn to others’ work. I’ll watch Dean Martin videos or a documentary or old game shows. For this memoir, I’ve been reading memoirs by other people — Gary Gulman, Viola Davis, Maria Bamford, Leslie Jones, Aparna Nancherla — and not only does that awaken my creative senses, it triggers memories. — Murray Hill, 52, comedian, actor and writer

Be Comfortable With Discomfort

There was a time when [my] body was always ready, and when I had so many axes to grind and windmills to chase [that] something would come out. Now I can’t just depend on my body being there — that I’m going to bust a move and seduce — so I have to be a little more strategic: “What’s the idea? Does it serve anyone other than you?” I’m trying to reaffirm for myself that what I have left in me to say is worth saying. Doubt is always with us, and it burns like fire. But if I refuse to give up the mantle of being a creative artist, I’ve got to do something. [You might say] “Well, why don’t you just love a child? Why don’t you go work at a soup kitchen down the street?” Because I’m a self-involved son of a bitch. Procrastination says, “I don’t dare,” but can you live with yourself if you don’t? So how do you start? Terror. Guilt. Fear. All negatives to this generation of young people who don’t ever want to be uncomfortable, but the generation that formed me and my own generation had that feeling that you’re being pushed against and you’ve got to push back, because you’re not like them. As Martha Graham said to Agnes de Mille, “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” I’ve got to believe that about myself, and the evidence is what I dare to do. — Bill T. Jones, 72, choreographer, director and dancer

If Your Work Goes Up in Flames, Don’t Fetishize the Ashes

One thing that eases the prospect of getting started is remembering that not everything you make needs to be for consumption or even to count as art. I recently spent nine months quietly making these works — mineral paint on cement slabs — and ended up throwing them all away because I decided they were too conventional. You’re not married to your old self, either. In 2013, there was an electrical fire at the studio I’d just moved into, and the building burned to the ground. I lost cartons of negatives and proof sheets that were over six feet tall, as well as photographs — stuff I’d made five, seven, 10, 15 years prior. Of course, it was traumatic and terrifying, but it was also freeing. Eventually I realized it was an opportunity for me to draw a line and stop making a certain kind of work. As artists, we think, “I got known for this type of thing,” or, “This is what everybody seems to like of mine.” A part of me felt, “I have to rebuild this person,” and then I thought, “Well, I don’t,” and I started something else. It was actually one of the most fruitful periods of my creative life. — Anthony Pearson, 55, painter, sculptor and photographer

Joan Baez holds a guitar and sings into a microphone.

Joan Baez in 1974.

David Redfern/Redferns via Getty Images

Practice Some Denial

When I was working on “Diamonds & Rust” (1975), I was at a low point of my career and I made a decision that I was going to concentrate on music and quit globe-trotting for different issues. I realized that the music needed my time and attention if it was going to be any good. Learning to live with the state of the world’s a daily practice. Everything we do, we do against the backdrop of global warming and fascism. I never dreamed I’d live in a world this chaotic and discouraging, and I’m overwhelmed but I’m also a great believer in denial — I think that’s where you have to be in order to create, or have fun or dance — providing that we set aside a certain amount of time to come out of denial and actually do something to help. — Joan Baez

Reject Fear. And Put Your Ego to Bed.

Last year, I went through what medical professionals would call a flop era. I’d had three years of the kind of lovely, psychotic busyness that has you hopping from job to job, just following green lights, but then everything went poof — the show I was working on got canceled; the financing for the film adaptation of my novel fell through. I’d been working on such personal things regarding sex and disability and, when those things ended or weren’t [well] received, I began to doubt myself. But then, you’re combating panic, and I started thinking really awful thoughts like, “Do I need to write a pilot where there’s a dead body?” Fear is the most poisonous thing to creativity. You can’t force it, and you have to listen to the work — it’ll tell you what it needs to be. Look at me getting all woo-woo, but it’s true. When you make a living off of writing, not every single project’s going to be from the depths of your soul, but I think there should always be some level of enjoyment. Starting over is really humbling, by the way. Knowing when to stop and when to start over requires giving your ego an Ambien. Real failure is letting your ego drive the bus of your life right off the cliff. — Ryan O’Connell, 37, writer and actor

Alice McDermott, 70, writer

There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway.

Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author

I’m putting the final touches on a new album, “Flow Critical Lucidity.” But after my memoir, “Sonic Life” (2023), came out, I realized my next mission was a novella, the working title of which is “Boomerang and Parsnip.” It concerns two madly in love youths in the wilds of Lower Manhattan circa 1981, and it’s wholly irreal, bordering on fantasy.

A painting of a bearded man with long white hair flipping through a book with a large die inside. Stacks of books are on shelves behind him. A sheathed knife hangs on the wall. On the table in front, a goblet and a baguette.

Courtesy of Samuel Delany

Samuel R. Delany, 82, writer

I’m writing a guidebook for a set of tarot cards I designed with the artist Lissanne Lake.

Susan Cianciolo, 54, visual artist

I’m preparing a solo exhibition that will open at Bridget Donahue gallery next month, so I’m making new works and curating older ones. It’ll definitely feature a book of my watercolor tree paintings, “Tell Me When You Hear My Heart Stop.”

Jenny Offill, 55, writer

I’m planning to start a band called Spacecrone. (I’ve stolen the name from a book of Ursula K. Le Guin essays.) It’ll be all female and 55-plus. Our faces will be made up like Ziggy Stardust, but we’ll wear sensible clothes and shoes. What’s kept me from starting it is that I can’t sing or play any instruments.

Alex Eagle, 40, creative director

We’re finessing our bag collection, which we’re trying to make as luxurious, but also as practical, as possible. And I’m planning to write a cookbook with my son Jack.

Earl Sweatshirt, with his hair in long dreadlocks, wearing a gray T-shirt and a wristband, holds up a microphone.

Jim Bennett/Wire Image, via Getty Images

Earl Sweatshirt, 30, rapper and producer

Making more music — it’s the one thing I always find myself coming back to, though every time I do, I have to overcome intense feelings of self-doubt. I also want to try stand-up, but I’m scared because there’s no music to hide behind. I don’t want dogs-playing-poker laughs, either. You know the [paintings] of dogs playing cards? Like, “Oh, it’s a rapper doing stand-up.”

Alex Da Corte, 43, visual artist

I’ve been writing an opera for some years now based on Marisol Escobar’s [assemblage] “The Party” (1965-66). It’s set at a time when the sun only shines for one day a year, and the players at the party are all wondering how to move forward while holding on to their pasts.

Danny Kaplan, 40, designer

While clay has been my faithful medium for years, I’ve lately been fueled to broaden the scope of my craft by embracing — and learning how to push the boundaries of — new materials like wood, metal and glass.

Kengo Kuma, 69, architect

Getting out of [Tokyo]. I’m doing my best to reduce the burden on big cities — I think humankind has reached a limit when it comes to congestion — and I’ve recently opened five satellite offices in places like Hokkaido and Okinawa.

Raul Lopez, 39, fashion designer, Luar

The thing I’m always meaning to restart is my video blog “Rags to Riches: Dining With the Fabbest Bitches,” an exploration of how food, fashion, music and art all connect.

Charles Burnett, 80, filmmaker

Right now I’m involved in the development of two films. The first, “Edwin’s Wedding,” is the story of two cousins, separated by the Namibian armed struggle with South Africa, who are both planning their weddings. The second, “Dark City,” also set in Namibia, is more of an emotional roller coaster about betrayal and vengeance told in the Hitchcockian mold.

Ludovic Nkoth, 29, visual artist

I’m looking to experiment outside the confines of the canvas — sculpture and video have always been lingering in the back of my head.

Elena Velez, 29, fashion designer

I want to start a series of salons to bring together great minds across multiple disciplines, while feeding the subculture that my work draws from.

Daniel Clowes, 63, cartoonist

I’ve always had the desire to do fakes of artworks I admire — to figure out how they were done, and so I could have otherwise unaffordable artwork hanging in my living room. Painting [with oil] is as frustrating and exhilarating as I remember it being when I was in art school 43 years ago, and my paintings look alarmingly not unlike the ones I did at 19.

Piero Lissoni, 67, architect and designer

I’ve started the design for several new buildings that will become government offices in Budapest. I’d like to start designing chairs, lights, skyscrapers, spacecraft. In truth, I’d like to start doing everything again.

A painting of tangled bodies fighting with a man raising a baby into the air.

Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents” (circa 1610), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Robert Longo, 71, visual artist

I’ve been struggling to figure out how best to make sense of the overwhelming images in the news, so I’m turning to the past. I’m working on two monumental charcoal drawings based on paintings [about war]: Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Massacre of the Innocents” (circa 1610) and Francisco de Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” (1814).

Gabriel Hendifar, 42, designer

I’m moving into a new apartment by myself after a series of long relationships. I’m excited to challenge my own ideas about how I want to live and to see how that affects the work of my design studio [Apparatus] as we begin our next collection.

Donna Huanca, 43, visual artist

I’m working on two solo exhibitions. One will be in a late 15th-century palazzo with underground vaulted rooms in Florence, Italy; the other in a modern white cube in Riga, Latvia. For years, I’ve tailored works to the architecture of their exhibition spaces, so I’m enjoying working within this duality.

Satoshi Kuwata, 40, fashion designer, Setchu

We’re about to start offering shoes. I’ve thought of the design. Now I just have to go to the factory and see them in real life.

Aaron Aujla, 38, and Ben Bloomstein, 36, designers, Green River Project

We’re starting a new collection of furniture based on offcuts from the studio that are finished with a modified piano lacquer. Hopefully, a suite of these pieces will be ready for exhibition by fall. We also have a commission we’re excited to start — a large sculptural fireplace made from three unique logs of rare wood.

Adrianne Lenker, 32, musician, Big Thief

I want to start learning how to paint. The few times I’ve tried it, I loved it but also felt daunted by all I needed to learn. I often think of my songs in terms of paintings. My grandmother Diane Lee’s an amazing watercolorist. Recently she gave me a lesson all about gray.

A textile artwork with patterns of green and purple bars and three circular patterns with a spider in the center.

Melissa Cody’s “Power Up” (2023), courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Melissa Cody, 41, textile artist

I’m starting to create wall tapestries that incorporate my pre-existing designs, which were handwoven on a traditional Navajo/Diné loom, but these new works are highly detailed sampler compositions made on a digital Jacquard loom.

Josh Kline, 44, multidisciplinary artist

I’m working toward shooting my first feature film — a movie, not a project for the art world.

Sally Breer, 36, interior decorator

My husband and I have started building some structures on a property we own in upstate New York — he has a construction company in Los Angeles. We’re using locally sourced wood and are 80 percent done with a studio-guesthouse, a simple 14-by-18-foot box set on foundation screws, tucked into a pine forest. This is the first time we’re really working together as a design-build team. He’s started referring to it as our “art project.”

Eddie Martinez, 47, visual artist

I’m restarting a group of large-scale paintings for an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum [in Water Mill, N.Y.] this summer. They’re each 12 feet tall and based on a drawing of a butterfly. The series is called “Bufly” since that’s how my son, Arthur, mispronounced “butterfly” when he was younger. I’d put the paintings aside while I finished my work for the Venice Biennale. Now I’m locked in the studio, painting like a nut!

Karin Dreijer, a.k.a. Fever Ray, 49, singer-songwriter

I’ve been thinking about learning to play the drums. They’ve always felt like a bit of a mystery to me.

Eric N. Mack, 36, visual artist

I’m starting to recharge in order to begin my next body of work. I journal, read, explore the Criterion Channel and get deep-tissue massages. I keep wishing I’d organize the fabrics in my studio.

Jenni Kayne, 41, fashion designer

We’re starting the next iteration of the Jenni Kayne Ranch [the brand’s former property in Santa Ynez, Calif., where she’d invite guests for yoga, dining and spa experiences], only this time we’re heading to upstate New York. We’re calling it the Jenni Kayne Farmhouse, and it’ll include a self-care sanctuary where slow living is a genuine ritual.

Christine Sun Kim, 43, multidisciplinary artist

I have a bit of an adverse reaction to people doing American Sign Language interpretations of popular songs on social media — they’re usually based entirely on the lyrics in English, when rhyming works differently in ASL. So I’ve been wanting to make a fully native ASL “music” video. One day.

Ellia Park, 40, restaurateur

I’ve started collaborating with the in-house designer at Atomix, one of the restaurants I run with my husband, Junghyun Park, on custom welcome cards for the guests that feature bespoke artwork.

Awol Erizku, 35, visual artist

Awol Erizku’s “Pharrell, SSENSE” (2021), from "Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax" (Aperture, 2023), courtesy of the artist

I’m focused on my exhibition “Mystic Parallax,” opening in May in Bentonville, Ark. [which will include concerts and portraits of such people as Solange and Pharrell Williams]. What I never seem to get around to is archiving all of my negatives in the studio.

Jeremiah Brent, 39, interior designer

As I navigate the [effect of the] ever-so-saturated interior design algorithm, I’m challenging our team to expand the language we speak, diversifying design references by looking to the unexpected: playwrights, films, historians and science.

Vincent Van Duysen, 61, architect

I’m focusing on the 90th anniversary of [the Italian furniture company] Molteni & C. I’m also excited about our recent addition to the family — a black-and-tan dachshund called Vesta after the virgin goddess of the hearth and home.

Kwame Onwuachi, 34, chef

I’m working on launching a sparkling-water line — the proceeds of which will help bring clean water wells to African countries — and starting to write my third cookbook. I start everything I think of.

Larissa FastHorse, 52, playwright and choreographer

I’m adapting a beloved American musical — I can’t say which — into a TV series. Which is scary because, even though I just adapted “Peter Pan” for the stage, the TV process is the opposite: Instead of cutting down a three-hour musical, I have to add hours and hours of content. So it feels like beginning over and over again.

Peter Halley, 70, visual artist

I’ve started to paint watercolors. Now that I’ve reached 70, I thought it was about time. The images are arranged in a grid like on a comic book page, but the narrative’s asynchronous. They’re based on images of one of my cells exploding, an obsession I’ve had going all the way back to the ’80s.

Darren Bader, 46, conceptual artist

I want to start an art gallery called Post-Artist that regularly shows art but refuses to name who made it. No social media presence. I also want to do what Harmony Korine is doing, except with none of that content.

Jeff Tweedy, 56, musician, Wilco

I’m about to record an album of new music with my solo band, which isn’t really solo at all. I’m bringing my sons and the close friends and quasi family who’ve been playing with me live for the past 10 years or so into the studio. I’ve written songs that feel like they can be a vessel for all of our voices together: a miniature choir. There’s really no experience that compares to singing with other people. I think it tells us something about how to be in the world.

Charles Yu, 48, writer

I’m about to start promoting the “Interior Chinatown” series [based on Yu’s 2020 novel]. I’d like to get into music and service. My son’s a drummer, and he’s awakened some latent impulse in me. And my daughter and wife have been volunteering. I’m not exactly sure what’s been keeping me from either. I could say work, but I suspect the actual answer is nothing.

Elyanna, 22, singer-songwriter

I’d love to improve my Spanish. I visit my family in Chile at least once a year and, every time I fly back to L.A., I realize that I need to keep practicing.

Boots Riley, 53, filmmaker and musician

I’m getting ready to start filming a feature I wrote about a group of professional female shoplifters who find a device called a situational accelerator that heightens the conflict of anything they shoot it at. I also have a sci-fi adventure: a janky, lo-fi epic space funk opera. My dream is to use the same crew and shoot the two movies back to back in Oakland, Calif. [where I live]. That’s one thing about being 53 — I want to be able to spend more time with my kids.

Boots Riley, wearing a brown jumpsuit, sunglasses, and with low sideburns, a mustache and a soul patch sits on a swing set in a park.

Damien Maloney/The New York Times

Sable Elyse Smith, 37, visual artist

I’ve recently embarked on an operatic project. Yikes! MoMA invited me to make a sound piece that’ll open in July, and it’ll be a kind of prelude to a larger version. It’s titled “If You Unfolded Us.” It’s a queer love story and a coming-of-age story about two Black women.

Satoshi Kondo, 39, fashion designer, Issey Miyake

My latest experiment with washi , or traditional Japanese paper, is blending fibers extracted from the remaining fabrics of past clothing collections with the pulp mixture from which washi is made. It’s a way of playing with color and texture.

Laila Gohar, 35, chef and artist

Almost all of my work has used food as a medium and has therefore been ephemeral. Making work that isn’t — namely, sculptures — is an idea I’ve been toying with for a while, but I haven’t been able to jump into it yet. I once read something an artist said about how she thought male artists are more concerned with legacy than female artists, and that female artists are more comfortable creating ephemeral work. This rang true for me, but now I feel slightly more confident about making things that might outlive me.

Patricia Urquiola, 62, architect and designer

I was nominated [last year] as a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, so now I’m writing the acceptance thesis, or discurso de ingreso . It’s an occasion to reflect on ideas — for example, I reread the philosopher Bruno Latour, who argues that design “is never a process that begins from scratch: To design is always to redesign.”

Luke Meier, 48, and Lucie Meier, 42, fashion designers, Jil Sander

We’ve started making some objects — glass and ceramics. We aren’t at all experienced in these fields, so it’s invigorating to play again.

Two women wearing baseball caps sit and talk. One, center, is holding a binder of papers with the label "The Salt Path Draft" on the front.

Kevin Baker/Courtesy of Number 9 Films.

Marianne Elliott, 57, director

I’ve always wanted to do a film, but it requires so much time and theater is a hungry beast, so it’s eluded me until now: “The Salt Path,” starring Gillian Anderson, is based on a true story about a remarkable English couple [who embark on a 630-mile hike].

Samuel D. Hunter, 42, playwright

Last year, I was approached by Joe Mantello and Laurie Metcalf, who wanted someone to write a play for Joe to direct and Laurie to star in. I’d never met either of them but, if I had to pick one actor on earth to write a role for, it would be Laurie. “Little Bear Ridge Road,” a dark comedy about an estranged aunt and nephew who are forcibly reunited after the passing of a troubled family member, will go into rehearsals in May.

Thebe Magugu, 30, fashion designer

When I was 16, I began writing a novel, taking place between the small South African towns of Kimberley and Kuruman, that I’ve contributed to every year since. It currently sits as a huge slab of a book — around 80,000 words — and I’ve been meaning to rewrite and polish the earlier chapters. I’ve given myself the next 10 years [to finish the project]. It’ll be a gift I give to myself when I turn 40.

Misha Kahn, 34, designer and sculptor

I have an idea for this toothpaste project called Zaaams that’s expanded, of its own volition, into an entire cinematic universe. Sometimes an idea can grow so big that it’s unmanageable and nearly unstartable. Sometimes I’ll really start working on it, but I get overwhelmed by the seismic rift in society it would cause and feel dizzy. Crest, if you’re reading this, call me.

Nell Irvin Painter, 81, visual artist and writer

I’m way too old to be a beginner. I’m 81 and have already written and published a million (OK, 10) books. But a very different kind of project’s been tugging at me: something like an autobiographical Photoshop document with layers from different phases of my life in the 1960s and ’70s — spent in France, Ghana, the American South. I’d have to be myself at different ages.

A black-and-white self-portrait of a smiling woman taken in a mirror.

Courtesy of Nell Irvin Painter

Sharon Van Etten, 43, singer-songwriter

In 2020, I became familiar with the work of Susan Burton, the founder of A New Way of Life, which provides formerly incarcerated women with the care and community they need to get their lives back on track, and was so moved by her story I asked my record label if it was OK to use money from my music video budget to produce a minidocumentary on the organization, “Home to Me.” I still have a lot to learn about filmmaking, but I think it’s the beginning of something beautiful.

Piet Oudolf, 79, garden designer

I’m starting the planting design for Calder Gardens, a new center dedicated to the work of the artist Alexander Calder in Philadelphia. I’m working on it with Herzog & de Meuron architects, and it’ll include a four-season garden that will evolve with the months. Early in the year, it’s about ephemerals (bulbs). Spring is when woodland flowers are important. Summer will be the high point of the prairie-inspired areas, and in fall and winter there’ll be seed heads and skeletons. I think a good, harmonious garden is like a piece of living art.

Rafael de Cárdenas, 49, designer

As a consummate shopper, I’ve always thought the best way to bring my interests together would be with a store — a lab for testing things out and creating a connoisseurship in the process. I’m thinking Over Our Heads (the second iteration of Edna’s Edibles in [the 1979-88 sitcom] “The Facts of Life”) meets Think Big! (a now-closed shop in SoHo) meets [the London gallery] Anthony d’Offay meets [the defunct clothing store] Charivari meets [the old nightclub] Palladium.

Gaetano Pesce, 84, architect and designer

I’m working on a possible collaboration with a jewelry company from Italy. I can’t say the name yet, but the pieces stand to be very innovative. Also, another collaboration with the perfume company Amouage inspired by time I spent in Oman’s Wadi Dawkah and the beautiful frankincense trees there.

John Cale, 82, musician and composer

Ever since I played viola in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, I’ve been hypnotized by the thought of the discipline needed to conduct. My attention soon wandered — from John Cage to rock music. Now, 60 years on, it’s finally time.

Nona Hendryx, 79, interdisciplinary artist and musician

I’m working on the Dream Machine Experience, a magical 3-D environment that’ll be filled with music, sound, images and gamelike features. It’ll premiere at Lincoln Center this June. [My idea was] to create an imaginative world inspired by Afro-Futurism that encourages a wide, multigenerational audience to share.

Faye Toogood, 47, designer and visual artist

I’d like to develop a jewelry collection, but I haven’t. Is it because no one’s asked — no phone call from Tiffany! — or because I’m struggling to understand how adornment fits into our current world?

Freddie Ross Jr., a.k.a. Big Freedia, 46, musician

I’m recording a kids’ album and publishing a picture book for early readers. Much of my art is about language and the unique colloquialisms that we have in bounce culture. Children respond to its snappy rhymes and phrases.

Danzy Senna, 53, writer

Every time I write a novel, I think, “This is the most masochistic experience I’ve ever had — I’m going to quit this racket.” But I feel incomplete without this depressive object to feel beholden to. I just finished editing one book [“Colored Television”] and have the sinking feeling I’m about to start another.

Jackie Sibblies Drury, 42, playwright

I’m starting, hopefully in earnest, to write a play in collaboration with the director Sarah Benson inspired by action movies. We were intrigued by the problem of trying to put chase scenes or action sequences onstage, where it’s difficult to build momentum or suspense because in theater we have less control over the viewer’s eye, among other things. But hopefully the play will be about what it means to see ourselves in these macho cis men who often get hurt pretending to almost die for our entertainment — or something like that?

Lindsey Adelman, 55, designer

I’m putting together a digital archive of my work and ephemera — about 30 years’ worth — revisiting everything from the sculpture I made as a student at RISD to the paper lights David Weeks and I sold for $25 to datebooks where I scribbled notes about things I wished would come true and then did. I hope it’ll encourage others to start something. I want them to understand, “Oh, this was the first step … this beautiful, finished thing was inspired by a piece of garbage dangling from a streetlamp.”

Elizabeth Diller, 69, architect, Diller Scofidio + Renfro

A shadowy image of a blurred figure in an illuminated doorway at the top of some stairs.

David Wall/Getty Images

Since 2012, when my studio was doing research for a contemporary staging of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” I’ve been meaning to start a book about ghosts. While ghosts are a well-trod literary device, their visual representation on stage and screen also has a rich history that can be told through the lens of an architect. Despite the fact that ghosts transcend the laws of physics, they’re stubbornly site-specific — they live in walls, closets, attics and other marginal domestic settings, and they rarely stray from home.

David Oyelowo, 48, actor

Something that three friends and I are in the process of building and developing is a streaming platform that we launched last year called Mansa. The idea — born out of growing frustration with making things that I love and then having to use some kind of distribution mechanism where the decision makers are almost always people who don’t share my demographic — is Black culture for a global audience. Essentially, we started a tech company that intersects with our love of story and our need to create [pipelines] for people of color and beyond to be seen.

Franklin Sirmans, 55, museum director, Pérez Art Museum Miami

There’s a recurring exhibition that I’ve worked on with [the curator] Trevor Schoonmaker since 2006 called “The Beautiful Game” that consists of art about soccer. We do it every four years because of the World Cup, and I’m starting to get into the 2026 iteration. I’ve also been trying to finish a book of poems since I graduated college more than 30 years ago. But it’s happening. It’s not like you don’t write a good sentence every now and then.

Jamie Nares, 70, multidisciplinary artist

I’ve always loved this line of poetry [from the Irish poet John Anster’s loose translation of Goethe’s “Faust”] that goes, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” One thing I’ve begun recently is a revisiting of my 1977 performance “Desirium Probe,” for which I hooked myself up to a TV that the audience couldn’t see, and relayed what was happening onscreen through re-enactment. Now I’m going to do it with YouTube videos chosen at random from the wealth of rubbish and interesting stuff on there. And as a video, because I’m not as agile as I once was.

Joseph Dirand, 50, architect and designer

A rendering of the interior of a hot air balloon, with a tufted carpet, a circular table and a curved upholstered bench. An oval window looks onto the top of clouds.

My firm has just started developing, with a French company called Zephalto, a prototype of the interiors for a hot-air balloon that will take travelers to the stratosphere, and the carbon footprint of the journey will be equivalent to that of the production of a pair of blue jeans. The balloon is transparent, so it’ll be almost as if you’re going up in a bubble of air — riders will see the curve of the earth. We’re designing three private cabins: sexy, organic cocoons that reference the ’60s and the dream of space, but are otherwise pretty minimal. The landscape is the star of the show.

Amaarae, 29, singer-songwriter

I’m working on the deluxe version of my 2023 album, “Fountain Baby.” The approach for the original album was very maximalist — I organized these camps all over the world and had a bunch of people come through to work on the music. Afterward, I felt underwhelmed — not by the project but by how I felt at the end of it all. [So] I stripped back everything so it’s just me and my home setup, trying ideas. Before, I was really lofty, but now my feet are touching grass a little bit.

Jennifer Egan, 61, writer

I’m starting a novel set in late 19th-century New York City. As always with my fiction, I have little idea of what will happen, which lends an element of peril to every project! Time and place are my portal into story, and I’m interested in a time when urban America was crowded and full of buildings we occupy today, yet the landscape beyond seemed almost infinite.

Carla Sozzani, 76, gallerist and retailer

Just as my partner, Kris Ruhs, and I revamped the then-unknown Corso Como area of Milan, we’re now putting our energy into the construction of a new studio for him, as well as the expansion of the Fondazione Sozzani [cultural center], both of which are in Bovisa, another old industrial neighborhood. I wanted to be an architect when I was young, but my father said, “No!”

Stephanie Goto, 47, architect

If my clients allow me to peel one eye away from their commissions, I’d like to dive deeper into the renovation of my own property in Connecticut, which includes the circa 1770 former home of Marilyn Monroe and a tobacco-and-milk barn that will house my studio.

Amalia Ulman, 35, visual artist and filmmaker

I’m beginning to write the script for my third feature film — probably my favorite part of the process, when I just need to close my eyes and see the film in my head. It’s the closest to a holiday because it feels like daydreaming.

Wim Wenders, 78, filmmaker

Several years ago, I started a project about the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who, along with others, designed the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art that’s being built now. The working title of the film is “The Secret of Places,” and it’s done in 3-D. My dream is to make a comedy one day. [ Laughs .] Seriously. [ Laughs again .] I’m working on it.

A painting of a pattern of triangular shapes in red, blue and orange.

Wendy Red Star, 43, visual artist

I’ve started highlighting Crow and Plateau women’s art history by making painted studies of parfleches, these 19th-century rawhide suitcases embellished with geometric designs. I’m learning so much about these women just by their mark making, but have only come across a few that have the name of the person who made it, so I’m titling my works by pulling women’s and girls’ names from the census records for the Crow tribe between 1885 and 1940.

Nick Ozemba, 32, and Felicia Hung, 33, designers, In Common With

Next month, we’re opening Quarters, a concept store and gathering space in TriBeCa that will feature our first furniture collection.

Bobbi Jene Smith, 40, dancer, choreographer and actress

My husband, Or Schraiber, and I are creating a work composed of solos for each dancer of L.A. Dance Project, where we’ve been residents for the past year and a half. We’ve had the unique opportunity to connect deeply with some of the dancers, and this — a gratitude poem for each of them — will be our culminating project. They’ll each be a few minutes long and characterized by physicality set against silence.

Editor’s note: The architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, whose comments are included in this piece, died on April 4 at age 84.

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IMAGES

'Fellow Travelers' Official Trailer with Matt Bomer & Jonathan Bailey
Fellow Travelers (2023)
Fellow Travelers : les premières images de la série gay avec Jonathan
Fellow Travellers is the queer political thriller coming soon
Fellow Travelers (Official Series Site) Watch on Showtime
Fellow Travelers serie TV: uscita, trama, cast e streaming

COMMENTS

Fellow Travelers (TV Mini Series 2023)
Fellow Travelers: Created by Ron Nyswaner. With Matt Bomer, Jonathan Bailey, Jelani Alladin, Linus Roache. Follows the lives and volatile romance of two different men, through purges, wars, protests, and plagues, overcoming obstacles in the world.
Fellow Travelers (miniseries)
Fellow Travelers is a 2023 American historical romance political thriller television miniseries based on the 2007 novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon.Starring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, it centers on the decades-long romance between two men who first meet during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The series premiered on October 29, 2023, on Showtime following an October 27 ...
Is Fellow Travelers starring Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer on Netflix?
Where to watch Fellow Travelers Fellow Travelers isn't available to watch on Netflix. Rather, it's a Showtime original series, meaning it's available to watch on the cable network.
Fellow Travelers movie review (2023)
This brief moment sparks both parties' decades-long pursuit of love and belonging. Adapted from the 2007 novel of the same name, "Fellow Travelers" truly begins once the show turns back the clock and focuses on Tim and Hawkins' initial meeting. From there, it becomes clear how different Hawk's life in the 1950s is from his life in the ...
'Fellow Travelers' Review: Jonathan Bailey, Matt Bomer ...
Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey's 'Fellow Travelers' Entwines an Erotic Love Affair With a Sharp Historical Epic: TV Review. Circumstances throughout history have forced people to hide ...
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October 23, 2023 12:01am. Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in 'Fellow Travelers' Ben Mark Holzberg/SHOWTIME. In the most lacerating episode of Max's dearly departed comedy The Other Two, the ...
Fellow Travelers Review: This Elegant Gay Love Story Transcends Most of
Fellow Travelers premieres Oct. 27 on Paramount+ With Showtime and Oct. 29 on Showtime. ... The Ultimate Guide to What to Watch on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Max, and More in April 2024.
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"Fellow Travelers," Showtime's steamy, bittersweet series about two men in love, covers an extraordinary amount of historical ground — including the Lavender Scare, the Vietnam War and the ...
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Jonathan Bailey shines in Showtime's Fellow Travelers, a period political drama about queer history, sex, and power. ... The 50 Best TV Shows on Netflix, Ranked (April 2024) By Paste Staff April ...
'Fellow Travelers' Official Trailer with Matt Bomer & Jonathan Bailey
Created by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers is an epic love story and political thriller, chronicling the volatile romance of two very different ...
Fellow Travellers
New eight-part drama series, created by Oscar® nominee Ron Niswanger, features Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in an epic love story of political entanglement...
Fellow Travelers
"Fellow Travelers" left me utterly heartbroken! This series is an all-encompassing, high-quality limited drama. ... The month ahead will bring a series adaptation of the videogame Fallout plus Netflix newcomer Ripley, Park Chan-wook's miniseries The Sympathizer, a sequel to Emmy winner The Jinx, Idris Elba's weirdest project to date, and more.
Fellow Travelers release date
Fellow Travelers is an eight-part series that launched on Paramount Plus with Showtime in the US and Canada on Friday October 27 2023, then on Paramount Plus on Saturday October 28 in the UK, Australia, Latin America, South Korea, Italy, Germany Switzerland and Austria. It's a major drama during the Autumn TV season for 2023.
Fellow Travelers: Limited Series
Rated: 8/10 • Jan 17, 2024. Rated: 2.5/4 • Jan 16, 2024. Based on the 2007 fictional novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon, "Fellow Travelers" follows the paths of political staffers Hawkins ...
Fellow Travelers (TV Mini Series 2023)
Fellow Travelers (TV Mini Series 2023) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. Menu. Movies. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. TV Shows.
Fellow Travelers Cast & Character Guide
The new Showtime series Fellow Travelers chronicles the secretive decade-spanning romantic affair between the fictional Howard Fuller and Tim Laughlin. Set during the height of McCarthyism in 1950s America, Fellow Travelers is based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon. The romantic political thriller miniseries is set to premiere on both Showtime and Paramount+ on October 27, 2023, and will run ...
'Fellow Travelers' Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out on
The episodes will drop on streaming on Fridays, and then air on Sundays at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific. Here, a guide to when the eight Fellow Travelers episodes drop: Episode 1, "You're Wonderful ...
Fellow Travelers
Show all TV shows in the JustWatch Streaming Charts. Streaming charts last updated: 5:18:16 PM, 04/14/2024. Fellow Travelers is 513 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The TV show has moved up the charts by 129 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Hijack but less popular than The Rain.
'Fellow Travelers'
Stream It Or Skip It: 'The Bricklayer' on Netflix, a Sloppy Spy Thriller Starring Aaron Eckhart ... The bad news is that Fellow Travelers is a miniseries, ...
Is Fellow Travelers starring Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer on Netflix
Fellow Travelers isn't available to watch on Netflix. Rather, it's a Showtime original series, meaning it's available to watch on the cable network. If you aren't a cable subscriber, the show can ...
Fellow Travelers
Based on the 2007 fictional novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon, "Fellow Travelers" follows the paths of political staffers Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin, whose paths converge at the height ...
'Fellow Travelers' Review: Showtime's Romance Lets Down Too ...
Showtime's series Fellow Travelers, starring Matt Bomer & Jonathan Bailey, lets its female, Black, and Queer characters down. Read on for our review.
10 Best TV Shows Like Fellow Travelers
With only two episodes left of Fellow Travelers, viewers will likely be looking for something else to watch after the series finale on December 15, 2023. Fellow Travelers is one of the best new shows on Showtime and arguably one of the best historical miniseries of the entire year, thoughtfully bringing Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel of the same name to life.
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2024 Emmys Supporting Actor Limited/TV Movie predictions include Robert Downey Jr, Jonathan Bailey, Joe Keery, Hugh Grant and Tadanobu Asano
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Jonathan Bailey as Tim Laughlin

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Fellow Travelers (2023)

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Fellow Travelers (2023)

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Is Fellow Travelers starring Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer on Netflix? (where to watch)

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