Entertainment
For 20 years, he's played 'Saw's' boogeyman. He doesn't see it as a trap
I’m sitting across the table from veteran actor Tobin Bell, whose gaze I try to hold. Between us lies a hefty metal briefcase containing nine composition books. One for each “Saw” film he’s appeared in. Two decades of rigorous preparation to play a horror mastermind.
The first page of handwritten notes for 2004’s “Saw” includes a drawn spiral interrogating the likes, dislikes and motivations of John “Jigsaw” Kramer, the methodical, hyper-intelligent, deadly-contraption designer who some call a righteous vigilante and others a ruthless killer.
“Each film is a different story and John’s in a different place,” Bell tells me, wearing a dark red-carpet-ready suit. “Same guy but different circumstances.” When speaking about his morally questionable character’s philosophy, Bell occasionally quotes Kramer’s phrases verbatim, with the same muted ferocity and growly voice as I’ve heard him do on screen.
“Live or die, make your choice,” he adds, sending chills down my spine on what would otherwise be an unremarkable sunny afternoon at the Lionsgate offices in Santa Monica.
Bell and Shawnee Smith in 2006’s “Saw III.”
(Lionsgate)
As part of this year’s Beyond Fest, Bell will attend a 20th anniversary screening of the first “Saw” in its unrated version on Friday at the Egyptian Theatre. (Later in the month, the chapter that kicked off the gruesome franchise will return to theaters for a limited time.)
Bell, 82, an acting savant who broke into cinema’s foreground in his sixties, explains that the pages are occupied by a series of questions about the character. They start with the most basic details — “Where am I?” for example — and evolve into increasingly specific queries until they form an inverse triangle brimming with insight he’s deciphered on his own.
He learned this method from Oscar-winning actor Ellen Burstyn at the Actors Studio in New York City back in the ’70s and has applied it to every role he’s landed since.
“By the time I get to actually rolling the camera I’m up to 128 answers,” Bell says. “You never know everything, but hopefully I know enough so I don’t go mad trying to play someone I don’t f— know at all.”
“I wanted to just follow my instinct rather than some kind of idea of a career.” Bell says of his early days that led him to acting.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He has always pursued the kind of lived-in performances of actors such as Montgomery Cliff, Gary Cooper or Spencer Tracy, whose movies Bell says he watched in the theater as a child in his hometown of Weymouth, Mass. every Saturday. “They became their characters,” he says of those screen legends. “You didn’t feel like they were indicating.”
Before stepping into the still-expanding “Saw” saga, Bell had been a working actor for almost three decades, amassing a varied collection of screen credits. Among them were memorable supporting parts in the racially charged crime thriller “Mississippi Burning” and Sydney Pollack’s “The Firm” (two of the four times he’s acted opposite Gene Hackman).
He watched Sidney Lumet direct Paul Newman in “The Verdict” while sitting in the courtroom next to Bruce Willis, another unknown at the time. And he’d experienced the heartbreak of being left on the cutting room floor after working with Martin Scorsese for “Goodfellas.”
“I had a scene with [Robert] De Niro that got cut,” he says. “You’ve got to be prepared for that s— too. I’m now in it only for a handshake and I say, ‘Come into my office.’ ”
Although Bell worked in summer-stock theater as a young man, he attended Boston University to study journalism, with specific aims to work in broadcast television. (In an alternate universe, Jigsaw would have become Walter Cronkite.) It was there that the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy would reset the course of his future.
Soon after the tragedy, Bell snuck into a drama-department-only session to hear Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy speak about acting as an honorable profession. That day, he concluded the world didn’t need one more talking head and decided to become an artist.
“Kennedy says in a speech to the poet Robert Frost that the artist is the last great defense of freedom, and that the artist has a love-hate relationship with society and keeps us on our toes,” Bell recalls. “I felt I no longer had any responsibility to anything. I wanted to just follow my instinct rather than some kind of idea of a career.”
“I always thought I was going to be a romantic leading man,” Bell says. “But an agent also once told me, ‘If you want to work, Tobin, they’ve got to see you as something.’ ”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
With a mattress tied to the top of his car, a resolute Bell moved to New York City in 1964 after being accepted at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Little did he know that in order to chase his acting goals, he would be laying on his back painting the underside of stairwells in a 17-story apartment building to make a living.
“I worked at 53 part-time jobs to keep myself going for more than 20 years in New York,” he says. “I loaded trucks, parked cars at the Hilton garage, bussed tables, waited tables, tended bar. I worked as background and a stand-in in 35 films before I ever spoke.”
His entry into an artistic life was far from linear, however. At one point during his time in New York, Bell married and had a child. In need of steady income, he took a master’s degree in environmental science and for the next six years created educational experiences for school children on the Hudson River, catching, observing and releasing fish.
Throughout it all, Bell held onto a strong conviction. “As much stage work and television as I did in New York, I believed I would become a film actor,” he says. Being part of the Actor Studio, a membership-only organization for professionals, help him keep that dream alive.
“I had a place to belong,” Bell says. “If they took you into the Actors Studio, it made one say to oneself, ‘Maybe I have something. Maybe I’m good enough.’ ”
But the years piled on and one day, a scene moderator at the famed acting workshop suggested that in order to advance his career, Bell should go to Hollywood and play “bad guys.”
“I always thought I was going to be a romantic leading man,” Bell says, remembering the frustration. “But an agent also once told me, ‘If you want to work, Tobin, they’ve got to see you as something.’ ”
Bell in 2023’s “Saw X,” which earned some of the franchise’s best reviews. “It’s all in the writing,” Bell says.
(Lionsgate)
Then came Alan Parker’s 1988 “Mississippi Burning,” in which Bell played an FBI agent. Bell remembers the late British director asking him, “You know why I had you come in, Tobin?” Parker then pointed at the headshot that Bell was using and said, “Because there’s power in that headshot.” A year later, on the recommendation of his “Mississippi Burning” co-star Kevin Dunn, Bell moved to Los Angeles.
He wasn’t here two weeks before he was cast as a criminal in the pilot episode of the 1990 television series “Broken Badges” that would shoot in Vancouver, Canada. From there, one job after another followed and for the first time he was able to make a living solely working as an actor. The quality of the projects ranged from compelling to forgettable. You may have seen him in one episode of “The Sopranos” as the head of a military academy, or on “Seinfeld” as a no-nonsense record store owner.
“I’ve learned more doing crap than I’ve learned doing good stuff,” he says. “Because you have to try to make it better, more interesting.”
“Saw” would eventually come his way in a fortuitous manner, like most breaks. He’d played Patrick Dempsey’s father on the TV show “Once and Again,” and while his character was a shadowy figure, Bell’s potent, piercing voice cut through. That series and “Saw” shared the same casting director, Amy Lippens, so when the debuting Australian director James Wan needed a voice for Jigsaw’s tapes in “Saw,” she suggested Bell.
It wasn’t until the first sequel, “Saw II” that Bell felt more substantial ownership of the character of John Kramer, whom he describes as a “King Lear-size guy,” making suggestions for the screenplay, including dialogue, which he has continued to do for each new film. And though Bell doesn’t condone Kramer’s actions, he understands his disdain for those he traps.
“John feels that the world has been taken over by mediocre people,” Bell says. “He believes we all have to deal with the consequences of what we create. And that these people are not appreciative of what they have.”
“When I was a kid I didn’t like going to horror films,” Bell says. “As soon as the scary part of a film would come up, I’d be down behind the seat.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Admittedly, Bell has never been a fan of horror (though he was impressed by the Australian slasher “Wolf Creek”). He prefers historical films and period dramas. But through conventions and casual meetings with horror fans, he’s gained an appreciation for their devotion to the genre and the thoughtfulness of their questions about Kramer’s worldview. He also has his own theory about why people like being scared.
“It’s a visceral experience that you can’t control,” Bell says. “You’re not just sitting, passively watching. All of a sudden you [jumps up from his chair, startled]. Some people like that. Not my cup of tea, necessarily. When I was a kid I didn’t like going to horror films. As soon as the scary part of a film would come up, I’d be down behind the seat.”
When I ask if he’s ever felt pigeonholed in the billion-dollar-grossing phenomenon of “Saw,” Bell suggests that every actor gets pigeonholed, whether as “an ingenue, the girl next door,” or in his case, a “bad guy.”
“If within being pigeonholed I can create a rich acting experience — which is why I became an actor — pigeonhole me, go ahead,” Bell says. “It’s every artist’s responsibility to create within whatever is given to him and it’s my job to change your perception of me. If you want to perceive me in a certain way, maybe you’ll see me differently when you see the next film.”
About the upcoming “Saw XI” slated for release during the fall of 2025, Bell confirmed he’s a main part of it. The hope, he says, after the reinvigorated critical and audience reception to last year’s Mexico-set “Saw X,” is to continue elevating the quality of the series.
“It’s all in the writing,” he adds. Bell believes horror films can be as layered as those of any other genre. “It’s not all one guy outside the screen door with sidelight on him.” And the fans, he says, always want to talk to him about the big moral questions of “Saw,” not the gory particulars.
“I’m really excited about continuing to develop him,” he says. “John Kramer is not done. There’s more to learn.”
Even after 50 years devoted to acting, there’s just as much left to be seen from Bell, who is also writing a memoir and his own screenplays — he’s putting on one of the pieces he’s penned at the Actors Studio soon. As he starts a new composition book for another Jigsaw tale, his own storied life keeps adding pages.
Comedy is a matter of taste and preference — it’s a deeply personal thing. Which makes it hard for a critic to give a blanket assessment of a specific kind of comedy, especially if it didn’t work for them, but clearly worked for others (the laughter or lack thereof is the indication). “It’s not funny,” the critic says, “well I had fun,” someone else can reply, and then we’re at an impasse.
Which is the dilemma one finds oneself in with “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” a very strange and shaggy Hollywood satire of sorts from David Wain and The State crew, still riding the goodwill of “Wet Hot American Summer” after all these years. If only this were as funny.
“Gail Daughtry” lives in the same world as that iconic summer camp spoof, as well as Wain’s 2014 rom-com parody, “They Came Together,” in that he’s playing with genre convention and expectation, taking well-known norms to the goofiest extremes. But those films hewed more closely to their respective genres, while “Gail Daughtry” is totally scattered, combining crime and spy movie tropes with a fish-out-of-water comedy and a Hollywood send-up. It has far too many ideas for its own good, and yet no ideas that are good enough to sustain this bizarre curio of a comedy.
What’s ironic is that one of the problems driving this wacky plot forward is the characters have to come up with a movie idea to pitch to star Jon Hamm (playing himself of course), leading them to do some pretty inane and shockingly violent things. It’s almost as if Wain and co-writer and co-star Ken Marino had no idea for a movie, then baked their search for an idea into their script, and then turned it into a madcap adventure about a woman on a quest to have sex with Jon Hamm. What an ouroboros!
OK, about the sex quest. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a chipper hairdresser from Kansas born without the part of the brain that recognizes sarcasm or irony. She’s a cheerful, Pollyanna-ish naïf whose literal-mindedness is almost as extreme as Amelia Bedelia. Her childhood sweetheart and fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) is the same. She tells him about the concept of the “celebrity sex pass” as a joke, and he promptly boinks Jennifer Aniston at local book reading.
(Nitpicky aside: why didn’t they use the common nomenclature “hall pass”? Is it copyrighted? “Celebrity sex pass” is clunky and sounds like an off-brand version of the well-known slang.)
That infidelity crisis is how Gail ends up in Los Angeles determined to bang Hamm, collecting a motley crew of similarly clueless helpers along the way. There’s her best friend Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley), her salon bestie; Caleb (Ben Wang), an overly ambitious intern at Creative Artists Agency; Vince (Marino), a screenwriter turned paparazzo with a heart of gold; and John Slattery, as John Slattery, down on his luck. An accidental briefcase swap has a pair of thugs on their tail, in a forgettable and underdeveloped B-plot.
With a parade of celebrity cameos and collaborators in bit parts, “Gail Daughtry” at times feels like an excuse for Wain and co. to make something at home with all of their friends. Fair enough, it’s great to see all these people employed, but what about what we’re watching? Behold, the Los Angeles of the middle-aged working comedian: the CAA lobby, the Chateau Marmont, Griffith Park, etc. And the plot is as half-baked as the pitch they present to Hamm.
What’s actually interesting about this comedy is the distinct streak of despair and even resentment that reveals itself at the climax, a feeling of helplessness and uselessness. Everyone’s been striving to make it in this crazy town: the intern, the actor, the paparazzo. But not even Jon Hamm can help them get a movie made; even he feels inherently powerless. There’s an unexplored anxiety vibrating there that feels the most thematically fruitful, about what it means, some 25 years after bursting onto the scene with a generation-defining comedy, about maintaining the work, the drive, a sense of purpose, after years of strikes, and in the face of a constricting industry. Do they still have it? Is the dream still alive?
Maybe that’s why Wain and Marino need to invent a dreamer stand-in with Gail, a guileless eternal optimist who knows nothing of the craven Los Angeles and accepts everything at face value (though she is filled with a scary bit of rage too). She might behave like she has a head injury, but she’s going to achieve her goal, dammit. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” might not be as funny as “Wet Hot American Summer” (for this critic), but reframed, it serves as a fascinating status update on life in La La Land for this troupe.
‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for sexual content, violence/bloody images and language)
Running time: 1:33
How to watch: In theaters July 10
Entertainment
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay on sex life as a single mom scores her a seven-figure book deal
Emily Ratajkowski’s viral essay detailing her sex life as a single mom just landed her a seven-figure book deal.
According to Page Six, the model’s essay in the Cut had publishers champing at the bit in a 12-way bidding war that culminated in the hefty pay day. Editor Helen Rouner at Penguin Press — who also edited Lauren Christensen’s memoir “Firstborn” and Michael W. Clune’s novel “Pan” — reportedly landed the deal.
Penguin Press did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment Friday.
Publishers Marketplace announced the forthcoming memoir, describing it as “an examination of modern female identity through the story of the author’s own efforts as a newly single mother in New York City to discover what really constitutes a good life for a woman.”
The essay, which dropped a month ago and quickly broke the internet, drops the veil on EmRata’s sexual adventures (or maybe misadventures) since she and her former husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard, split in 2022.
“It was a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching tit and ring on my swollen finger,” Ratajkowski writes of new motherhood. “And then, in a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated.”
In the missive, the model interrogates her sexuality — is she a Madonna or a whore? — while untangling bigger questions around gender, power and self-actualization. If Carrie Bradshaw wrote about “Sex and the City,” then Ratajkowski is writing about sex, the city and single motherhood. And naturally, her fleeting paramours have vague monikers: “Vegan Graffiti Artist,” “Spanish Gen-Zer” and “Son of a Billionaire.”
“And then there was the Elder Millennial: obsessed with dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk,” she writes. “He had approached the subject coyly at first, like it was something he was kind of embarrassed about — the way a kid will test you to see if you’ll talk to them about their dorky obsession of the moment. Do you like Godzilla? What about Star Wars?”
Would-be sleuths with Ratajkowski’s essay and a gossip rag handy will have their work cut out for them.
This will be Ratajkowski’s second book. The first, “My Body,” dropped in 2021 and was a bestselling collection of essays exploring gender, power dynamics, sexuality and the commodification of female beauty in the modeling and entertainment industries.
Ratajkowski’s foray into the spotlight came more than a decade ago when Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” music video made the model an overnight star. She was cast in David Fincher’s adaptation of “Gone Girl,” which hit theaters the following year, and catapulted to top fashion runways — Marc Jacobs, Versace, Victoria’s Secret and Dolce & Gabbana, to name a few. She she’s been romantically linked to Harry Styles, Eric Andre, Shaboozey, Brad Pitt and Pete Davidson, among others.
In 2023, she moonlighted as the host of the “High Low With EmRata” podcast, where she interviewed sex workers, investigated ethical nonmonogamy and pondered the etymology of the word “toxic.” The same year, she told The Times that she was coming into herself post-divorce, “Being able to assert what I want — that feels like it just started: My life as a creator and not as a muse.”
Wainheads will be delighted to see his alums in cameos: Kerri Kenney-Silver, Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, and supporting roles for Zickel and Truglio. A large portion of the cast are his homies. But with Deutch, Gutierrez-Riley, Wang, Slattery, Impacciatore, and yes, Hamm, it’s as if they’re being inducted into a new mad family. Wain and Marino are basically catching Pokémon and hoping they can hold onto the roster (by that logic, yes, Paul Rudd is a legendary Pokémon). The film is anchored by Zoey — everything everywhere all this summer with Voicemails From Isabelle to Minions & Monsters — Deutch in the Dorothy Gale role, exuding a high level of perkiness consistent with the character’s can-do, wide-eyed, midwestern charm and heart.
A major standout, Ben Wang finally gets to show off his comedic abilities, portraying a self-assured, quick-witted agent who makes me laugh every time he reveals his sheltered upbringing in snappy whines at every inconvenience. Sabrina Impacciatore, who has proven to be a comedic juggernaut in The Paper, is having so much fun hamming it up as the mob boss-esque wicked witch counterpart, torturing her henchmen and deliciously chewing up the scenery whenever onscreen. I don’t think they use her to the height of her comedic prowess, but she’s a delight nonetheless. John Slattery is the film’s comedic MVP. The way the writers use his over-the-top character for comedy is downright hilarious every time. They use him as either a punchline or a force of nature, and he’s great. This movie is like Mad Men propaganda, and by God, it works. As someone who’s never seen it, Gail allowed me a better appreciation for Slattery and Hamm.
Man, we don’t deserve Jon Hamm. This is the second time I’ve seen him play a silly, fictionalized version of himself this year (the other being the SXSW crowd-pleasing rom-com Wishful Thinking, which Gail distributor Sony Pictures Classics acquired), and he also voice-acted in his comedic Mayor Jerry role in Hoppers. Maybe working with Wain in 2007’s The Ten was the canon event, but I consider his weird little sex scene with Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids his awakening. Since then, I’ve only seen him as unserious, and it’s delightful. Oz-like in appearance, he’s funny and befitting the film’s overall light, joyful nature.
LAST STATEMENT
Ultimately, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a campy, delightful romp that succeeds as both a distinctive Hollywood‑centric riff and a Wizard of Oz reimagining, retaining a loving, twisted, demented charm. It’s a weird description, but it’s so high‑spirited and light‑hearted despite being strangely ultraviolent. It might as well be a live‑action episode of Smiling Friends (RIP), yet it’s everything the theatrical market needs today. Ten years ago, this would’ve been a studio production rather than an indie Sundance acquisition, but thank God it exists for the big screen. More absurdist Gail Daughtrys for cinemas (not streaming), please, because this is the most fun to be had in a theater all summer, if not the year thus far.
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