Richard Chamberlain, who soared to fame as the handsome young Dr. Kildare on television in the early 1960s and two decades later reignited his TV stardom as a seasoned leading man in the highly rated miniseries “Shogun” and “The Thorn Birds,” has died. He was 90.
A Los Angeles native, Chamberlain died Saturday night in Waimanalo, Hawaii, of complications from a stroke, according to his publicist, Harlan Boll.
“Our beloved Richard is with the angels now. He is free and soaring to those loved ones before us,” Martin Rabbett, his lifelong partner, said in a statement reported by Associated Press. “How blessed were we to have known such an amazing and loving soul. Love never dies. And our love is under his wings lifting him to his next great adventure.”
In a six-decade career that spanned television, movies and theater, Chamberlain played a wide variety of roles — including Hamlet and Professor Henry Higgins on stage and a swashbuckling French musketeer and a frontier America trapper on screen.
“I need to do theater. If I don’t, I feel something is missing,” Chamberlain told The Times in 1984. “But I love doing television and movies too. And I think I’ve shown that an actor can do all three.
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“As I’ve said before, the fun in acting is playing different roles. If you’re just going to play one role all your life, you might as well be selling insurance.”
Chamberlain was a virtual unknown with a limited number of TV guest shots and a low-budget movie to his credit when he was cast by MGM as Dr. Kildare in the hour-long medical drama. As Dr. James Kildare, an idealistic young intern at Blair General Hospital, Chamberlain starred opposite Raymond Massey as his wise medical mentor, Dr. Leonard Gillespie.
“The series may be among the solid hits of the season,” predicted Cecil Smith, The Times’ late TV columnist, shortly after “Dr. Kildare” made its debut in 1961. “Chamberlain is an agreeable, attractive young actor with great warmth; he’s an ideal foil for the expert Massey, one of the finest actors of our time.”
Overnight, the tall, blond, blue-eyed, 27-year-old former college sprinter, who later admitted to being “as green as grass” as an actor, became a teen idol and a fan-magazine favorite who was soon generating up to 12,000 fan letters a week.
“Dr. Kildare,” which premiered on NBC the same season as another popular medical drama on ABC, “Ben Casey,” starring Vince Edwards, ran for five years.
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Raymond Massey as Dr. Gillespie, left, and Richard Chamberlain as Dr. Kildare with a patient in the 1960s NBC series “Dr. Kildare.”
(NBC)
During his time off from the series, Chamberlain starred in two movies: as a trial lawyer in the 1963 courtroom drama “Twilight of Honor,” and opposite Yvette Mimieux in the 1965 dramatic love story “Joy in the Morning.”
But his role as the noble TV doctor remained his greatest claim to fame at the time, his popularity generating comic books, trading cards, a board game, a doll and other merchandise bearing his white-coated “Kildare” likeness.
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Chamberlain’s weekly TV exposure also led to a brief side career as a recording artist, one that revealed a pleasing baritone on releases that included the album “Richard Chamberlain Sings.”
“Kildare had been an incredible break for me, and a grand, if grueling, rocket ride,” the actor recalled in his 2003 memoir, “Shattered Love.” “Though I was considered more a heartthrob than a serious actor, it had put me on the map.”
That point was driven home during a luncheon gathering at Massey’s home when veteran English actor Cedric Hardwicke told him, “You know, Richard, you’ve become a star before you’ve had a chance to learn to act.”
After his five-season run on “Dr. Kildare,” Chamberlain turned down a number of new TV-series offers, preferring instead to concentrate on theater and film.
His first attempt on Broadway — in a troubled 1966 production of a musical version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with Mary Tyler Moore — ended when producer David Merrick pulled the plug on the much-anticipated musical’s opening after only four preview performances in New York.
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Chamberlain went on to appear in what he called his first serious film, playing Julie Christie’s occasionally violent husband in “Petulia,” a 1968 drama directed by Richard Lester.
Determined to obtain “some solid acting training,” he moved to England, where he immediately was cast in a 1968 six-hour BBC production of Henry James’ novel “The Portrait of a Lady.” Instead of joining an acting academy in London, as he had planned, Chamberlain received what he referred to as on-the-job training during his more than four years living in England.
Indeed, “The Portrait of a Lady” led to a challenging, most unlikely role for TV’s Dr. Kildare: Hamlet.
His performance in the BBC production of the James novel had drawn the attention of the well-known Birmingham Repertory Company, which was looking for a known actor who could fill seats for its upcoming production of the Shakespeare tragedy.
Richard Chamberlain, left, as Edward VIII, acts with Faye Dunaway, as Wallis Simpson, on the ABC Television Network’s re-creation of their love story in “Portrait: The Woman I Love” in November 1972.
(ABC)
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After undergoing long and intensive rehearsals, Chamberlain said he was amazed when most of the London critics gave him “quite good” reviews. He later went on to play Hamlet in a different production for Hallmark Television.
“Having graduated from pretty boy to actor, I was at last taken seriously, and it was an exhilarating experience,” he wrote.
Chamberlain appeared in director Bryan Forbes’ 1969 film “The “Madwoman of Chaillot,” starring Katharine Hepburn, and he starred as the Russian composer Tchaikovsky opposite Glenda Jackson in director Ken Russell’s 1970 film “The Music Lovers.”
Among his other film credits in the ‘70s were “The Three Musketeers” (1973), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and “The Last Wave” (1977).
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Chamberlain’s early work on the American stage included starring in the Seattle Repertory Theater’s 1971 production of Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” a performance deemed by Times theater critic Dan Sullivan as “an astonishingly accomplished one.” And his 1973 starring role in “Cyrano de Bergerac” at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles earned him a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
Over the years, Chamberlain starred on Broadway four times, all in revivals: as the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon in “The Night of the Iguana” (1976-77), as Charles in “Blithe Spirit” (1987), as Professor Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady” (1993-94) and as Captain Georg von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” (1999).
On television, his leading role in the 1975 TV movie “The Count of Monte Cristo” earned him the first of his four Emmy nominations.
But it was a string of TV miniseries that would give him his biggest post-“Dr. Kildare” career highs, beginning with his role as Alexander McKeag, a bearded Scottish trapper, in “Centennial,” a star-studded 12-episode historical epic that aired on NBC in 1978-79.
Richard Chamberlain, right, portrays John Blackthorne next to Frankie Sakai as Lord Yabu in the TV miniseries “Shogun.”
(NBC )
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Then, in 1980, came his starring role in “Shogun,” an NBC miniseries set in feudal Japan in the year 1600. As John Blackthorne, a shipwrecked English navigator who is taken prisoner, he becomes involved in a battle among warlords seeking to become Japan’s supreme military ruler and falls in love with his married interpreter.
Chamberlain was unprepared for the response to his role in the critically acclaimed, highly rated miniseries.
“I’d forgotten about being besieged in supermarkets,” he told The Times in 1981. “I used to get it during my ‘Dr. Kildare’ days, but then it stopped and I forgot about it. Now it’s started all over again.”
In the 1983 ABC miniseries “The Thorn Birds,” he played Father Ralph, an ambitious Catholic priest who struggles with his vows after falling in love with the beautiful young niece (played by Rachel Ward) of the wealthy matriarch of a sprawling Australian sheep ranch (Barbara Stanwyck).
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Dubbed the “king of the miniseries,” Chamberlain won Golden Globes and received Emmy nominations for his performances in both “Shogun” and “The Thorn Birds.”
He went on to earn another Emmy nomination as the star of the two-part “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” on NBC in 1985, in which he played a Swedish diplomat in Budapest who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II.
Actor Richard Chamberlain poses during his time at the Pasadena Playhouse while staring in “The Heiress” in 2012.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Born George Richard Chamberlain in Los Angeles on March 31, 1934, Chamberlain was named after his grandfather but was always called Dick or Richard. He and his older brother Bill grew up in Beverly Hills, in a three-bedroom house in what Chamberlain called “the wrong side of Wilshire Boulevard.”
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His mother was a housewife. His father, a salesman for a small company that manufactured grocery-store fixtures, was an alcoholic whose periodic drinking binges devastated the family. When Chamberlain was about 9, his father joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
After graduating from Beverly Hills High School, where he was a four-year letterman in track, Chamberlain majored in art at Pomona College in Claremont. Despite being shy and inhibited, he began “moonlighting” in the drama department, where, he later wrote, he found himself “fast losing my heart to drama.”
Drafted into the Army after graduation, Chamberlain spent 16 months as an infantry company clerk in South Korea.
Intent on becoming an actor after his two-year stint in the Army, he returned to Los Angeles, where he was accepted into an acting workshop taught by blacklisted actor Jeff Corey and landed an agent.
Chamberlain quickly began doing guest roles on TV series such as “Gunsmoke,” “Bourbon Street Beat” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
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Throughout most of his long career, Chamberlain took great pains to keep a secret from the public: He was gay.
Although his friends and people in show business knew, Chamberlain said he avoided talking about his private life in interviews, fearful of what it would do to a career built on his being a romantic lead opposite a woman.
But that changed with the publication of his candid memoir in 2003, a time in his life when, as he told the New York Times, he no longer had “an image to defend.”
By then, he had been in a more than two-decade-long relationship with Rabbett, an actor, producer and director. The two lived together in Hawaii until Chamberlain returned to Los Angeles in 2010 to resume his acting career.
Chamberlain had always hated himself for being gay, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I was as homophobic as the next guy,” he said. “I grew up thinking there was nothing worse.
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“Sixty-eight years it took me to realize that I’d been wrong about myself. I wasn’t horrible at all. And now, suddenly, I’m free. Out of the prison I built for myself. It’s intoxicating. I can talk about it positively because I’m not afraid anymore.”
Actor Richard Chamberlain in 2003 in Los Angeles.
(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
Despite his concern over how the public would react, he found acceptance and warmth instead.
“Everyone has been so supportive, so positive ,” he said. “In New York, people walked up to me in the street, and in theaters. Strangers gave me the thumbs up, wished me well, said, ‘Good for you.’ I’m just awestruck by the change in the way I feel about life now.”
My name is Jon Halperin. I booked and managed Chain Reaction from 2000 to 2006. It started by accident while I was running a one-person record label. I went to the club to see the band Melee perform and the prior talent buyer for the club had just quit that day. I told owner Tim Hill I’d do it (having only booked three shows ever at a coffee shop). We slept on it, and I was hired the next day.
I joined Ron Martinez (of Final Conflict). He was booking the punk and hardcore shows. I booked the indie, ska, emo, screamo and pop punk stuff. We made a great team. Best work-wife ever.
Story time. My friend Ikey Owens (RIP) hit me up and told me that he and the guys from At the Drive In were going to be starting a new band. I’d booked Defacto (their dub project) before, and we agreed to throw them on a show and just bill it as “Defacto.” There were maybe 200 people there to see the first show for a band that would soon be known as the Mars Volta.
That wasn’t out of the ordinary. Chain Reaction had many artists grace that stage that went on to bigger things: Death Cab for Cutie, Avenged Sevenfold, Maroon 5, Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, Taking Back Sunday, Pierce the Veil, My Morning Jacket. The list goes on and on.
Jon Halperin, who booked Chain Reaction from 2000 to 2006, stands in front of the club during its heyday.
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(From Jon Halperin)
I used to make a deal with the kids. Buy a ticket to “X” show, and if you didn’t like the band, I’d refund you. I never had to. I knew my audience and they trusted my curation of the room. … It was by the kids, for the kids, except I was 30 at the time. I had to think like a teenager. My friend Brian once called me “Peter Pan.”
Halfway through my reign, social media became a thing. There was Friendster and a bit later MySpace. YouTube stated just a few years after. But those first few years of me at the venue, it was word of mouth. It was paper fliers dropped off at coffee shops and record stores. It was the flier in the venue window. It was Mean Street Magazine and Skratch Magazine.
I’d tease the press when they wanted to review a show. If you don’t show up with a pen and paper, you aren’t getting in (sorry, Kelli).
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Most music industry went to the Los Angeles show, but smart industry came to us. Countless acts got signed following their shows. You’d often see the band meeting with a label in the parking lot near their tour van.
It was a dry room when I was there. No booze or weed whatsoever. We made only one exception to the weed rule. An artist in a band with Crohn’s disease who traveled with a nurse. Not saying bands didn’t drink backstage, on stage, in their vans (we rarely had buses), but what we didn’t see didn’t happen.
Touche Amoré performing at Chain Reaction in 2010.
(Joe Calixto)
We were often referred to as the “CBGB’s of the West,” and for a lot of bands, locals and touring acts alike, we were just that. We were the epicenter. There were other venues of course, but for some reason, we were the venue to play. Showcase Theater in Corona was edging toward its demise. Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana was done. Back Alley in Fullerton wasn’t active. Galaxy Theater [in Santa Ana] was still, well, the Galaxy. There was no House of Blues Anaheim. Bands would drive a thousand miles to play one show at Chain Reaction. We were where the local bands started as first of four on a bill and would be headlining us within a year. We were their jumping-off point. We were where the kids came out. The real fans, many of whom started bands themselves.
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Thankfully, there are other smaller venues out there today fostering the all-ages scene: Programme Skate in Fullerton, the Locker Room at Garden AMP [in Garden Grove], Toxic Toast in Long Beach, the Haven Pomona, but it’s just not the same. It was a moment in time. A time that will be forgotten in a few decades, but for today, my social media is being inundated with memories of a room that was a second home for thousands of kids.
Zero regrets. It was the best and worst times of my life. Working a day gig and then heading to the venue nearly every day of the week was rough. Relationships and friendships were hard, being that I couldn’t go out at night. I couldn’t get a pet. I was constantly tired. But I wouldn’t trade those six years for the world.
If this week’s Telugu release Gurram Paapi Reddy were a human, it would most likely be a teenager. It bursts with energy, overflowing with ideas and wearing its unabashed enthusiasm like a badge of honour. The audience too might end up surrendering to its infectious energy. Yet, like a distracted teenager, the film also gets so enamoured by its very idea that it loses control and does not know where to stop.
The vibe is eerily similar to Jathi Ratnalu early on. Again, Brahmanandam (as Vaidyanathan), is a judge. Faria Abdullah, the actress in the former film, is the only female presence in the lead lineup here. The other oddball male characters — Gurram Paapi Reddy (Naresh Agastya), Chilipi (Vamshidhar Goud), Goyyi (Jeevan Kumar) and Military (Rajkumar Kasireddy) — are the not-so-smart ones who get entangled in a mess.
The similarities end there. Brahmanandam, who is in terrific form, sets the tone of the comedy, doling out harsh punishments to petty criminals, not for their crimes, but for their sheer stupidity in getting caught. Gurram, Chilipi, Goyyi and Military are the victims who reunite after their jail term. This time, they are joined by Soudamini (Faria).
Storyline: A gang of four ex-convicts swap dead bodies for easy money and land in a ‘royal’ mess.
While their earlier heist at a jewellery store goes terribly wrong, the new plan is strangely simple. The four men need to swap a dead body from Srisailam with another body in a graveyard in Hyderabad for a meagre sum. While they execute it, albeit with difficulty, it gets messy when the motive behind the swap comes to the fore, dating back to a royal gift from the pre-Independence era.
The key conflict is established prior to the intermission, but newer problems surface later. Though the story idea is deceptively straightforward, the director builds many layers to the fun quotient and it’s evident that he treats comedy like serious business.
The actors react to the situations without trying too hard to impress. The scenes are not only thematically funny, but also packed with outrageously hilarious one-liners. Every time one feels the film’s trajectory is sorted, there is a surprise. The screenplay is busy with backstories and subplots.
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The second hour could have benefited from some economy in writing. Past connections are strung together, newer characters and their complexities are introduced, there are backup plans, flashbacks and a song is thrown into the mix. Thankfully, the humour quotient remains unaffected. Some breather would have been welcome.
The subplots involving Sangi Reddy, particularly the courtroom proceedings, and Markandeya Raju’s son crowd the screenplay, leaving the viewers with too many dots to connect. It’s inevitable for some restlessness to creep in towards the final 45 minutes — a stretch packed with several events and coincidences. A clever climax salvages the film.
Gurram Paapi Reddy is aware of the crucial balance between the goofiness of its characters and the seriousness of the plot. Too many characters and a packed, expansive narrative make the film exhausting, given its 160-minute runtime.
Naresh Agastya, Vamshidhar Goud, Faria Abdullah, Jeevan Kumar and Rajkumar Kasireddy share wonderful on-screen camaraderie and get ample scope to shine individually too. Yogi Babu, as a convict with night-blindness, brings the roof down even when he doesn’t dub for himself. Motta Rajendran’s antics look repetitive at times, though they land well.
This is also among Brahmanandam’s best on-screen appearances in recent times. It’s an absolute joy to see the veteran actor ever-hungry to prove his worth when he senses potential in a scene. John Vijay is in dire need of reinvention with his dialogue delivery and body language. Both songs in the film, composed by Krishna Saurabh, though well-shot, feel abrupt.
A narrative with lesser flab would have amplified the film’s impact. The makers tease the audience with a potential sequel idea, but appreciably it does not appear forced. The film is also complete in itself.
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Gurram Paapi Reddy is a smartly written and performed con-comedy that delivers laughs aplenty, though a few segments become indulgent.
It is often said that film directors are siloed off from one another, that they don’t get to watch how others work. So when you put a group of them together, as with the six participants in The Envelope’s 2025 Oscar Directors Roundtable, they are quick to share all sorts of ideas. Like where they prefer to sit in a movie theater — centered in a row or on an aisle? How far back is the best for sound, or so the screen runs up to the edges of your peripheral vision? Should you even take the worst seats in the house, since somebody will eventually be asked to pay money to sit there?
Guillermo del Toro, there with his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel “Frankenstein,” likes the top of the first quarter of the theater. Rian Johnson, who finds new twists for Benoit Blanc in his third “Knives Out” detective story, “Wake Up Dead Man,” says, “I look for wherever Guillermo’s sitting.” Nia DaCosta, who made the bold, adventurous Ibsen adaptation “Hedda,” likes the top of the first third. Mona Fastvold, who explores the life of the founder of the religious movement known as the Shakers in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” likes the center a little farther back. Jon M. Chu, who made the second part of a musical adaptation with “Wicked: For Good,” sits dead center — and has been known to talk to the theater manager if the sound isn’t loud enough. And Benny Safdie, who explores the rise and fall of mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr in “The Smashing Machine,” tries to find a spot where he can fidget in his seat and not bother anyone.
Read on for more excerpts of their conversation about the art of adaptation, navigating budget constraints at any scale and much more.
Jon, I’ve heard you say that with “Wicked: For Good,” you wanted the film to be deeper but not darker. And it doesn’t pull any punches as far as dealing with themes of antiauthoritarianism. What was it like to have those very serious ideas and yet still have this be a buoyant, crowd-pleasing musical?
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Chu: The reason we made it was because it had that meat to it, and it was always a two-movie, yearlong experience that set up the fairy tale first. And Movie 2 is kind of where we all are, this moment of this fairy tale shattered in front of us.
I have five children now, so I’m thinking about how to present stories to my kids. Do I still believe in the possibility of dreams and the American Dream? “For Good” really gets to delve into that stuff. And because it was shorter than the first half, we get more room to do it. We added new songs to explore that idea. So it all felt really fitting. Movie 1 could be an answer. Movie 2 is much more of a challenge: Who are we gonna be now that we know the truth?
All of your films in their own way are speaking to right now. Rian, “Wake Up Dead Man” is specifically set in the year 2025 and all the “Knives Out” pictures have been dealing with our contemporary reality. What makes you want to do that?
Johnson: That kind of started for me with the first movie. This is a genre, the murder mystery genre, that I love and that I’m just seeing so much of growing up. But it’s also a genre where most of what I had seen throughout my whole life, murder mysteries are period pieces set usually in a cozy little bubble of a little “Queensfordshire” place in England.
And I guess my realization was, that’s not what Agatha Christie did. She was not writing period pieces. She wasn’t an incredibly political writer, but she was always writing to her time. It’s not trying to do anything radical in terms of making it new or updating it, but let’s set it very much unapologetically in the modern moment. … You have a group of suspects that have a hierarchy of power amongst them and the person at the top they all wanna bump off — it’s such a potent vehicle for building a little microcosm of society.
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Benny, one of my favorite things in “The Smashing Machine” is that it’s funny to realize setting a story at the turn of millennium is a period piece now. What was it like crafting this very specific, recent time period?
Safdie: It’s a time period that I think everybody thinks is just yesterday. But when you actually get into the nitty-gritty, it’s a long time ago. And things were very different and everybody knows exactly what those things are too. Because it was heavily documented, there was so much footage of it, it’s so top of mind. And I think a large amount of people also want to go back there a little bit, to this time where the internet was just kind of happening. People want to go back to this simpler moment. But trying to re-create what that feels like is what I was really going after — just thinking about how you would live in that time, and then represent that in the movie. Because I did want it to kind of feel like time travel.
Guillermo, you’ve spoken so much about how “Frankenstein” has been a lifelong dream project for you. Now that it’s done, where does that leave you?
Del Toro: There’s a massive postpartum depression, No. 1, and it’s real. And it affected me more than I thought it would, to be candid. But fortunately, I’ve been very interested in two new themes that are going to be sure to produce blockbusters, which is memory and regret. The dynamic duo of past 60. And I always thought about that in the abstract, but now I try to make the movies not only about the moment I’m in, but about me.
And I’m seriously trying to express what makes me uneasy, what makes me believe in the possibilities of grace even in the most horrible circumstances. And I’m not talking only social, but personal or philosophical. Something happens when the six clicks in on the counter. And all you can do is [ask], “Do I feel I have something to say, genuinely?” And then you go to that. Cronenberg, I had dinner with him when he was turning 74, and he said you have to scare yourself into being young again.
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Nia, “Hedda” is such a bold adaptation of the play “Hedda Gabler.” You switched the gender of one of the main characters. You aren’t afraid to inject issues of race and class and sexual identity into the story. Were you ever concerned that you were asking too much of this classic text?
DaCosta: I wrote it on spec, so I wasn’t thinking about anything besides letting my freak flag fly, basically. I just thought, “This character makes more sense as a woman.” OK, what does that mean now? How does that affect the rest of the story? And then I just go from there. And then it ended up being really bountiful and generative.
And then when I met Tessa [Thompson] three years later, I thought, “Oh, when I write this, eventually Tessa will play Hedda.” So now she’s Black. OK, what does that mean? And Tessa’s also mixed-race. So then you get that element of it as well. And then I chose the 1950s, and then I chose England and the country house. You just treat these things as truths, and the story has to go in a certain direction. So I never worry about those things. Maybe because I’m a Black woman, so my presence or my identity for some people will complicate the story. But for me, it just is life.
Guillermo, in adapting “Frankenstein,” did you feel like you were dealing with the Mary Shelley text and also all the Frankenstein movies that we know?
Del Toro: I put all the cinematic stuff on the side. I didn’t want to make an erudite cinematic movie or a referential movie. I have lived with the three iterations of the text for my entire life. And there’s a lot of the interstitial stuff that I took from her biography, fusing with my biography, because even if you sing a song everybody knows, you’re doing it with your lungs. And your passion and your pain and your throat. … It’s the difference between seeing a living animal and taxidermy. If you just want the text, then buy the text. You cannot be more faithful to that text than reading the text. But if you want to see how we interact and resuscitate something into being emotional again, then that’s what we try to do.
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Mona, “The Testament of Ann Lee” is a story told with music, but is it a musical? Is that a question you asked yourself as you were making it?
Fastvold: I consider it a musical. I do. But it’s just a different kind of musical. No one’s singing dialogue. It’s not magic when they start to sing. I think, as I was writing the script with Brady [Corbet], we realized early on it had to be a musical because the Shakers worship through ecstatic song and dance. They would be moved by the divine spirit and then receive a song or a piece of movement, and then they would start to sing and dance. Their life was a musical, so that’s what it had to be. And that was exciting to me, to create the whole structure of that.
But it couldn’t be, “OK, here’s a story and then here’s an amazing musical number.” It had to come from this place of worship. So all the musical bits and pieces of the film, our moments of feeling moved by the spirit and having this sort of religious experience, it had to be grounded in that and it had to be really organic-sounding and -looking. So we had to ground it in live recordings and create the soundscape and the music in dialogue with my choreographers. Every body slap and stomp is part of the rhythm and the music of it, because it couldn’t just be where diegetic audio fades out and then there’s this great, wonderful piece.
Chu: In a weird way, we all make musicals. All the movies, everybody has a take on how music integrates with it.
Del Toro: I was aiming for opera.
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Guillermo, Jon, both of your films have a sense of scale to them. What kind of challenges does that present? Is it wrangling all the extras? Is it having the sets built on time? Jon, just the number of florists credited at the end of “Wicked: For Good” is wild.
Chu: It’s like building Disneyland, essentially. We had the warehouses going — there’s first a recording studio, so we’re recording music while their dance rehearsals are going on. You have hundreds and hundreds of people. Then you go to the costumes department and then you have the hair, just the wigs alone. People are getting there at 2:30 in the morning. And that’s before you even start the day.
We were planning two movies at the same time. So we had 20-something musical numbers rehearsed and worked with our cinematographer and our team to understand everything and build sets around these pieces. And then you get there on the day and how do I say, “Hey, all that stuff we did, this is actually happening over here. Let’s move everything over here”? I felt the hardest thing was being OK with wasting money if it was the right thing to do at that moment. I needed to feel free and had everybody aware that if I’m moving all of a sudden, we’ve got to go and we’ve got to figure it out. And I think that’s where the magic is.
Del Toro: To me, it’s three things. The first one is tonal, meaning everything that you do, you’re not doing eye candy, you’re doing eye protein. You’re telling a story. So it’s not about looking good or looking big. It’s about, does the gesture happen at the right moment? Because you can make gestures on the wrong moment of the film, and they don’t have a dramatic impact. I say we designed the movie for the Creature to feel real, of a piece with the world. So that’s the first one.
The second one: Is it expressing something different every time we go to a bigger thing? It’s not about the scale. And the final one to me is, does it feel real in the world? So the way I go at it is, there’s no typeface, no paint, no photograph, nothing, that cannot be investigated and designed to within an inch of its life. Even great movies, I’m very fidgety. I go, “That’s not a painting from the 1930s. Somebody painted it much later.” Or a typeface or a carnival banner or something like that. So at the end of the day, if you do your job right, you have a world and people just get into it almost like a vibe. Nobody should notice, but if you do it right, they want to experience it over and over again.
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Rian, you make a really bold decision in “Wake Up Dead Man,” where the signature character of the series, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, is offscreen for much of the first 45 minutes or so of the movie. Did you have to convince people that’s the way things should go?
Johnson: Not really. For this one, first of all, it is a little closer to actually a traditional detective structure. That’s kind of how most Agatha Christie books work, is you meet the suspects in the first act. You get a very good idea of who’s gonna get bumped off. And then, end of the first act, the murder happens, and then the detective shows up and starts to solve it. So there was a precedent for it. But the real reason I had done backflips in the previous two movies to get around that was so we could get Blanc in there earlier. The reason it made sense for this [is] because Father Jud, who’s played by Josh O’Connor, [is] kind of the protagonist of it because of the themes of religion, and so the whole lay of the land was more complicated and delicate in this one to set up. I felt like the audience would be best served by having that runway and getting the time before this powerhouse that is Daniel playing Benoit Blanc comes in and brings this whole new energy to it.
The other thing that I’ve landed on with them is you have to constantly resist the candy of the mystery. You have to always remind yourself [that] the mystery elements are not a load-bearing wall, that those are never going to keep an audience entertained or engaged. You need to do the same thing you do in any movie where you have an emotional, bold line going that’s thrown at the beginning, that lands at the end. And the mystery then has to support that.
Mona, with “Ann Lee,” but also with “The Brutalist,” it seems like the movies that you and Brady Corbet are collaborating on together, you’re doing so much with relatively limited resources. What is it that the two of you are doing in these films that you’re able to make them seem so grand?
Fastvold: I mean, there’s no trick. I had to prep for almost a year for this one, because I knew that no one was going to give me a lot of money to make a musical about the founders of the Shakers. It was not gonna be this sexy pitch. It was a hard pitch. So I knew that it was going to be a limited budget. But at the same time, I just desperately wanted “Ann Lee” to have a really grand story. And I wanted there to be a believable, lush world. And I wanted to tell a story about her whole life, not just a day in her life.
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So I had to make it work somehow. It was so much about saying, “OK, I’m working with my [director of photography], my production designer, my costume designer every weekend and night for months and months before we started official prep. And same with my choreographer and composer and with all of the cast as well, just rehearsing. Amanda [Seyfried] was rehearsing at night while she was shooting something else. She would go and have dance rehearsals at night, on the weekends, so we could keep on adjusting.
So the only way that I could, to quote David Lynch, get dreamy on set, which was something I really wanted, was by having so much prep time, and then just really knowing what my Plan A and B was, and to sort of experiment in advance more. And because I knew there’s no way that you can try and build a world and then have the same flexibility on this budget, it’s all about knowing every line item in my budget, what everything costs in Hungary, what everything costs in Sweden. “OK, this is how much a cherry picker in Hungary costs, and therefore I’m gonna take out two shots and only build half the roof.”
The 2025 Envelope Directors Roundtable. Top row, left to right: Rian Johnson, Benny Safdie, and Mona Fastvold. Bottom row, left to right: Nia DaCosta, Jon M. Chu and Guillermo del Toro.
Chu: I think that’s one of the biggest lessons I learned being a director. You don’t have a right to make your movie, because it costs so much and you need so much help. You do have to earn the right to make your movie. That is a part of our job.
Nia, you come to “Hedda” having just made a Marvel movie. You’ve just also finished a sequel to “28 Years Later.” Is there a secret through line for you that connects all these projects?
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DaCosta: Being a nerd, Marvel, horror, comic books, for me, those things that I’ve done that I haven’t written are worlds that I loved as a kid. So “Candyman” was hugely important to me when I was younger. I used to love Marvel comics as a kid. “28 Days Later” is one of my formative films that I watched. And so when the opportunities came up to be a part of those worlds, it was really exciting for me. And then “Hedda,” I’m a theater nerd too, so I just really go by my passion, and I’m really compelled by just interesting characters.
“Hedda” and “28 Years Later” are very different films, but for me, they were so similar because I learned from my experience jumping into the studio system after making a sub-million-dollar movie [“Little Woods”] what works for me and what doesn’t work for me. And what works for me is really being given authorship. And so I’m setting the tone early. We’re not here to battle. We’re here to make the vision that I have. And if you’re into it, cool and great, let’s work together. If you’re not into it, then it doesn’t have to exist or I’ll find another way for it to exist.
Del Toro: The ambition should always be beyond the budget. If they give you $130 [million], you want to make a movie that is $260 [million]. But the way to that I found by doing “Devil’s Backbone,” which is $3 million, or “Shape of Water,” which is $19.3. “Shape of Water” opened with all the different sets in the first 15 minutes. And then it’s two sets. Lab, apartment, lab, apartment, lab, apartment. I always tell the departments, let’s choose meatballs and gravy. Where do we put the real resources? You reach a plateau no matter what the budget. Never spend money on a plateau. It always needs to mean something.
Safdie: You pick and choose the moments when you’re gonna get big. We were doing the hospital scene and then we built the plane in the hallway of the hospital. Because that was the most affordable. But there was a column in the middle of the plane, and I would always joke that we should go through the column. I find those limitations exciting. Because you really have to figure it out.
Rian, “Glass Onion” had a more robust theatrical release than “Dead Man” has gotten. Do you feel like as filmmakers that all of you are being put in this position of fighting for the future of theaters and moviegoing?
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Johnson: I actually feel incredibly optimistic at this moment about the future of moviemaking. I don’t feel that way because we’re all picking up signs and marching down the street and preaching to people that they need to keep this sacred. I feel optimistic about it because I go to movie theaters and I see them packed with young people who want to go to movie theaters and have that experience.
And I see them coming out for new movies. I see them at revival cinemas. I see theaters at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday showing a Melville film that are just full of young people who are excited. And then you see it with movies that have come out this year. You see it with something like Ryan [Coogler]’s movie, “Sinners,” or with so many films that have struck chords with audiences and created cultural events. You can’t wag your finger at people and say, “You should be going to the theater and having this theatrical experience,” but you feel it rising right now. And so for me, it’s less that I want to advocate for it. It’s more that I want to ride that wave of it coming up.
