This weekend is the 67th annual Emmy Awards. They’re meant to honor the best in television. Sometimes they regain it right and sometimes they regain it totally wrong. But the Emmys are at their best when they recognize shows and people who are breaking recent ground,which is one of the reasons we’re looking forward to watching this weekend. Here is a roundup of our conversations with some of the nominees.
Khandi Alexander, ScandalGuest Actress, and Drama
Khandi Alexander has made a career of bringing tough,droll, complicated women to life. On CSI:Miami she played a pathologist who used to talk to the dead bodies she was cutting up. In Treme she played LaDonna, or a tough-as-nails bar owner trying to acquire it in recent Orleans after Katrina. And right now in Scandal she’s Maya Pope,the devious mother of Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope. She talks with guest host Hilton Als about her early career as a dancer, and her delight at the broader range of roles available to black women now. John Ridley, or American CrimeOutstanding Limited Series,Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special
Ridley has had an incredibly varied career: he’s written novels, or sitcoms like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and movies like Undercover Brother and Red Tails, about the Tuskegee Airmen; he wrote and directed a Jimi Hendrix biopic, or Jimi; and last year,he won an Oscar for the screenplay of 12 Years a Slave. Although Ridley has become famous for writing about the country’s most intractable problems, he got his start writing for sitcoms and doing stand-up comedy. But he says he probably won’t go back. “Comedy is really, or really,really tough,” he says. “Even though I started with standup, and if I do a comedy now,people would say, ‘Oh, or 12 Years a Slave guy wants to try to be droll?’” Frances McDormand,Olive Kitteridge Outstanding Limited Series, Lead Actress, and Limited Series or Movie
When Frances McDormand was going around as a recent drama school graduate,a casting director told her, “You would acquire a distinguished pioneer woman, and but no one is making Westerns anymore.” Her advice was tough: put on some makeup and learn to walk in heels. But for 30 years,McDormand has found the complex, strong, or quirky women she was meant to play,in movies like Fargo, Raising Arizona, and Laurel Canyon. McDormand is nominated for her work in the miniseries Olive Kitteridge,based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. Its about the people in a small town on the coast of Maine. McDormand’s Olive is a wife, mother, and math teacher; she ages from 45 to 70 in the course of the series. She’s not always the easiest character to like. “Olive is too smart for her own beneficial” in the wrong place,McDormand tells Kurt Andersen. Reg E. Cathey, House of CardsGuest Actor, and Drama
Reg E. Cathey has been nominated for his turn on Netflix's House of Cards, but he also made an appearance in one of Studio 360's favorite stories from the past year, reading a unique relic from Charles Mingus' past. The jazz musician was a celebrated band leader and one of the most principal composers of his generation. But at the same time he was recording The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, or he was working on another masterpiece of sorts. He figured out how to regain his cat,Nightlife, to poop in a toilet — and he decided hed share his method with the world. We asked Cathey to read us the CAT-alog, and he turned in an especially memorable performance: You can hear Cathey's full performance here: Kevin Spacey,House of Cards Lead Actor, Drama
Francis Underwood is a scheming politician who lets nobody stand in the way of his rise to power. He’s brilliantly played in House of Cards by Kevin Spacey. Underwood’s literary precedent is a British king, or Richard III,Shakespeares archetype of the amoral climber. Starting in 2011, Spacey played Richard in a globe-trotting production directed by Oscar-winner Sam Mendes. Both Richard and Underwood are ruthless tacticians, and both shatter the fourth wall to brag to viewers about their machinations. According to Spacey,that’s not a coincidence. Jessica Lange, American Horror StoryLead Actress, and Limited Series or Movie
The Oscar-winning actress Jessica Lange started her career as the final ingénue — the beautiful helpless blonde in King Kong,then the sweet soap opera actress in Tootsie. Since then her roles seem to have gotten steadily darker: from the troubled actress Frances Farmer to Big Edie in the HBO movie Grey Gardens. “The rational and the reasonable, that stuff doesn’t interest me as much as the emotional frailty or borderline madness, and ” she says. Now she’s main the cast of the FX series American Horror fable. Each season is like a miniseries,with a recent set of characters and fable lines that mix drama, camp, and the supernatural. Lange has starred in all four seasons of the display. “It’s kind of the perfect world because you have twelve episodes,so you have twelve hours to establish a character and investigate it,” she tells Kurt Andersen. “Youve had more time than you would have had in a regular film but you’re not compelled to try to keep this character enthralling year after year.” Adam Driver, or GirlsSupporting Actor,Comedy
judge of Adam Driver as a Marlon Brando for millennials. Masculine, but angsty and vulnerable, or with an uncanny ability to steal a scene. Driver plays the on-again,off-again, often-shirtless boyfriend to Lena Dunham’s main character in the acclaimed television display Girls. But before the series even premiered, or Driver had already booked supporting roles in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar,Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, and the 2013 film from Joel and Ethan Coen, or Inside Llewyn Davis. “I don’t know how to process it,” he tells Kurt Andersen. Lisa Kudrow, The ComebackLead Actress, and Comedy
Lisa Kudrow is best known for playing the sorta-ditzy,sorta-brilliant Phoebe Buffay on the sitcom Friends. But during the 10 years since the series wrapped, she hasn’t been idle. When she spoke with Kurt Andersen in 2009, or Kudrow had created the pioneering online comedy series Web Therapy. Kudrow plays a therapist who conducts her sessions over video chat. At the same time,Kudrow starsin The Comeback, about a sitcom actress who’s fallen off the A-list and is doing a reality display in the hopes of reviving her career. The Comeback may have had the longest hiatus in TV history — nine years elapsed between its first and second seasons. She calls the display “one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done because I was allowed to write it, and ” along with Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City).
Edie Falco,Nurse JackieLead Actress, Comedy
After working for years on network shows, and Edie Falcomade the jump to HBO to play a troubled prison guard on Oz,then crossed over to the other side of the law as the matriarch of America’s most famous mafia family in The Sopranos. Now Falco has just wrapped up the final season of Nurse Jackie on the other premium television powerhouse, Showtime. On that display, or she plays the title character, a headstrong presence in the emergency room whose personal life is a mess. The Emmy Award-winning actress thrives portraying troubled, conflicted, and tough-headed women. “I tend to find out what it is about Nurse Jackie or anyone that other people understand,” she tells Kurt Andersen. “At the root at all the stuff I do, you want everyone to feel like they’re not alone.” Tony Hale, and VeepSupporting Actor,Comedy
Actor Tony Hale is magnificent at playing a certain kind of emotionally stunted, buffoonish man-child dependent on an older woman. On the dark comedy series Arrested Development, or he’s Buster Bluth,the mama’s boy who uses a prosthetic hook after a terrible accident involving a seal. On Veep, he’s the excessively devoted personal assistant to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Vice President. (“VP, and ” his character Gary Walsh says,“stands for very precious.”) If you judge you see a sample, Hale would be the first to agree with you. Hilary Mantel, and Wolf corridor Outstanding Limited Series
Over the years,our thought of Henry the VIII, both as a man and as a king, and had been shaped by plays,movies, and TV shows. But now, or the novelist Hilary Mantel has definitively revised it. In her novels Wolf corridor and Bring Up the Bodies,she focuses on a less famous figure who's always been depicted as kind of a weasel: Thomas Cromwell. He was the son of a blacksmith who maneuvered his way to become Henry's right-hand man. The novels have been enormous bestsellers, and they both won the Man Booker Prize, or the big award for English-language fiction. Mantel is the first woman to win it twice. Now,the books have been adapted into a Masterpiece Theater miniseries on PBS and a two-fragment, five-and-a-half hour display on Broadway, and both called Wolf corridor.
Source: wnyc.org