Entertainment
A trio of new TV thrillers can provide some action and escapism this Thanksgiving
It seems like only the week before last that I was reviewing two thrillers — “Cross” and “Day of the Jackal” — in a single review. (Because it was.) And now I’m going to review three more, similarly grouped. I guess it’s a thing! And there are more on the way.
Why so popular? Thrillers promise … thrills. Even the less good ones can sustain interest over several episodes, if they throw in enough red herrings, amazing reversals, a modicum of action and suspense and an amazing revelation held back to the end of the series like a carrot on a stick. You may be disappointed when you get there, but you will get there.
Doing everything right is “Get Millie Black” (HBO at 9 p.m. PT Mondays, first episode now streaming on Max) — the echo of “Get Christie Love!,” the mid-’70s Teresa Graves detective show, a rare series with a Black woman in the lead, doesn’t seem a complete coincidence — is set primarily in the humbler precincts of Kingston, Jamaica; Tamara Lawrance plays Millie, who was sent away as a girl to live in England, where she becomes a Scotland Yard detective. After her mother’s death, she learns that her brother, Orville, whom she believed dead, is alive.
Suddenly, it’s one year later; Millie is working for the Kingston Police, and brother Orville has become sister Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), living with a tribe of gay and transgender outcasts in the system of storm drains called the Gully. “Most people would call this place a sewer,” Millie says. “My sister calls it home.” The Gully is a real place; Jamaica is notoriously homophobic — “The most homophobic place on Earth?” Time magazine asked in 2006 — with anti-gay laws still on the books, which keeps Millie’s partner, Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) in the closet.
As in most — all? — detective fiction, one case reveals another; suspense springs from never knowing exactly where we’re headed. Millie’s search for Janet Fenton (Shernet Swearine), a missing teenager, is complicated by Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), a (white) British detective who arrives from London looking for (white) rich kid Freddie Summerville (Peter John Thwaites). Freddie, he says, is needed in England to help take down a major gang; but he’s a person of interest to Millie, as well. As these storylines collide and various factions jockey for advantage in the wreckage, there will be murders and attempted murders and more murders.
The characters are vivid, unpredictable in a human way and perfectly played. The five-part series feels original, not quite like anything we’ve seen before. Created by the Booker Prize-winning Jamaican novelist Marlon James, it registers as authentic to its place and people, while being true to the noir tradition — tropical Raymond Chandler.
In Netflix’s “The Madness,” Colman Domingo stars as Muncie Daniels, a media pundit who finds himself at the center of a mystery.
(Amanda Matlovich/Netflix)
Created by Stephen Belber, the old-school conspiracy thriller “The Madness” (Netflix, premiering Thursday), proceeds from the Hitchcockian device of a regular Joe who finds himself at the center of, and a suspect in, a mystery, and goes on the run to clear himself, like Robert Donat in “The 39 Steps” or Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” Alfred Hitchcock kept these stories down to a couple of hours, and I do believe that given the opportunity to stretch out over several episodes, he’d have stuck to two. “The Madness” does its work over eight, which strictly speaking is more than it needs. But there’s a lot to like about it.
Colman Domingo plays Muncie Daniels, a Black, Philadelphia-based CNN pundit and fill-in anchor, who in the series’ opening moments is attacked by a guest for no longer being involved in “the fight,” limiting himself to Harper’s magazine or an Ivy league lecture, when he once ran a non-profit “that took on racist landlords.” The implication, which subsequent comments will make explicit, is that he has lost himself — as one friend says, “going with your career, your ambition, your whims, then lying to yourself about it the whole while.” People are not shy about telling Muncie where they think he’s failing.
A distracted father to teenage son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and adult daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham), he’s dragging his feet on a divorce from Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake). Looking to get away, Muncie repairs to a borrowed cabin in the Poconos, where, almost immediately he finds the body of a neighbor chopped up in a sauna — so much for relaxing. After escaping a pair of masked assailants, he brings the police around; the sauna, you will have guessed, is clean as a whistle. Meanwhile, evidence is being planted to frame him.
Domingo is required to spend a lot of time looking worried or otherwise pained; his stress wears on you after a bit, and so it’s a relief to find him (briefly) at a backyard barbecue, in relative safety. (And the whole megillah does seem to have a positive on his marriage, which is nice.) Also lifting the mood are John Ortiz as an FBI agent, Deon Cole as Muncie’s friend and lawyer and Stephen McKinley Henderson (appearing currently in “A Man on the Inside,” having a season at 75) as a wise old family friend and cigar store proprietor.
The action sweeps through some colorful locations — a chase in an empty theater, a meeting in a colonial recreation village, reconnaissance at a suburban swingers bar — that would not be out of place in a Hitchcock film, if he’d worked into the age of suburban swingers bars. The plot brings in white supremacists, militant anarchists (“basically Antifa on meth with Uzis”) and a couple of gazillionaires, one played by Bradley Whitford, as the trail leads, as it must, higher and deeper, into the dark heart of capitalist America. (“Maybe this is all a bit bigger than you thought,” someone suggests to Muncie.) Of course, these days, the (real) conspiracies seem to be all out in the open, making “The Madness” feel sort of quaint.
Showtime’s “The Agency” stars Michael Fassbender as a covert CIA agent, and Jodie Turner-Smith as his love interest.
(Luke Varley/Paramount+ with Showtime)
Premiering Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime (Showtime at 9 p.m. PT Sunday) is “The Agency,” as in Central Intelligence. Based on a French series, “Le Bureau,” and set largely in London, it has been “created for American television” by Jez Butterworth, a Tony-winning British playwright, and his brother John-Henry Butterworth, who earlier collaborated on the screenplays for “Ford v Ferrari,” the James Brown biopic “Get on Up” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” It is the least thrilling of these thrillers.
Michael Fassbender plays Martian, the code name his colleagues address him by (he’s got a couple of other names as well, used as convenient); as the series begins he’s ordered back, with only two days notice, from Ethiopia, where he has been undercover for some time, to the agency’s London station — which necessitates telling new lies to his already lied-to married lover, Samia (Jodie Turner-Smith). Samia, after some time, will arrive in London, where they will covertly take up again. Coincidence?
Back in London, Martian connects with handler Naomi (Katherine Waterston), whom he has only ever met over Zoom, boss Henry (Jeffrey Wright) and bigger boss Bosko (Richard Gere). It’s not a seamless transition. His agency-provided apartment comes bugged and his movements are tracked. (The scruffy agents assigned to follow him represent the series’ only real attempt at humor.)
Dr. Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris), one of the series more centered characters, arrives from Langley “to evaluate mental health across the department,” and though this seems particularly, if not exclusively, for Martian’s benefit, it’s true that nearly all these folks seem unhappy — with the notable exceptions of Blake, Naomi and Owen (John Magaro), another handler — as a result, they’re the people you’re the happiest to see. Martian is especially a pill, at work, at home with his teenage daughter, Poppy (India Fowler), and even with Samia. We do understand that he’s good at his job and a person of some authority, and torn between love and work, but when has that ever been an excuse?
The series has the strange quality of being under- and overwritten; people don’t talk much, and when they do, they don’t necessarily talk like people: “There are 170,000 words in the English language,” says Bosko. “Each year 2,000 of them become obsolete; they enter the great verbal bathtub of our collective being. Presently circling around that open drain are these words: stoicism, fortitude, duty, honor, sacrifice.”
Of 10 promised episodes, as of this writing only three were made available for review, at the end of which things are only beginning to come together. One assumes — hopes, anyway — that something compelling is going to happen in those remaining seven hours, but the direction is so thick with style and the characters so little developed, that it’s hard to work up more than a cursory interest in anyone’s fate.
That might change, of course. Disparate plotlines will presumably converge. There’s a compromised double agent on the run in Eastern Europe, leading to some skippably torturous scenes of torture, and a new recruit, Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) being sent on her first assignment with what feels like little to no preparation.
“There’s a cost for doing this work,” she’s told. “A price. Are you sure you want to pay it?” (The price is “surviving totally alone forever.”) Run away, I want to say. There are so many other series you could be in.
Chunky platform sandals, fitted baby tees, butterfly clips on perfectly crimped hair, brightly patterned skirts and tons of sparkles. Pure Y2K-fueled nostalgia filled the Kia Forum on Wednesday night in celebration of all things Hilary Duff.
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Duff graced the stage at the Inglewood venue as part of her Lucky Me tour, her first global headlining tour in nearly two decades. And her fans couldn’t have been more thrilled. The pop singer and actor, who released her sixth studio album “Luck… or Something” in February, performed two back-to-back sold-out shows.
Before the final L.A. show, we caught up with fans to talk about their outfits (many of which were inspired by Duff’s most famous roles such as Sam in “A Cinderella Story” and the title role in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie”), the memories her music brings up for them and why her work still resonates with them. Here’s what they had to say.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Tristan Hallam, 36, of Chicago
Tell us about your outfit.
This is my wedding dress that I had stuffed in a suitcase. She’s been in a suitcase for 10 years, and I still fit into her, which is nice. People ask me why I keep stuff and this is exactly why: You might get divorced and use it as a costume. My outfit is inspired by “A Cinderella Story.” It’s my favorite Hilary Duff movie. She plays diner girl Cinderella. She disguises herself with a mask and a L.A. Dodgers cap. I did have a tiara, but I didn’t bring it because I didn’t want to be too much. So I figured, you know what, why not buy an apron and a little black crop top, and rep L.A.
I have a tattoo of her signature. It’s a little faded because it’s like 10 years old, maybe older than that now. It was at a book signing at Barnes and Noble at like the Grove or something. I asked her if she would initial my wrist, and I got it tattooed the same night. I literally drove to the tattoo shop on Hollywood Boulevard with my arm out the window because I’m so clumsy and I didn’t want to smudge it. Then the next time I saw her, she asked me, what did your parents say? I said, “My mom asked me how long I kept the Sharpie on so long.”
How long have you been a fan?
I think I was like 8 or 9 years old when I saw “Casper Meets Wendy” for the first time. My grandma took me to like a K-Mart or something, and told me that I could get any movie that I wanted. Then I was into “Lizzie McGuire,” but as soon as Hilary started doing all her like movies and independent work, obviously the music is great. I used to live in L.A., so I went to a bunch of her book signings. I’ve done a lot of meet and greets for her concerts, and right now I’m traveling around. I’m going to 18, technically 19 shows now, and I’m gonna see her in New Zealand, Australia and some other places. I’m actually really excited because one of my friends, I met her in a Hilary Duff fan club chat room in 2005 on MSN Messenger, and we are still friends, so we are going to a ton of shows together.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
The fact that we’re around the same age, there’s been a lot of relationship similarities. I don’t have any kids, but the struggles with family, with your dad, with your siblings. She’s got some songs that are more mature and relatable for people our age. People who have gone through ups and downs in relationships, struggles with family and figuring out who your real family is, not just by blood but who your chosen family is. I think that’s really important.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Leilanie Martinez, 30, of South Gate
Tell us about your outfit and the inspiration behind it?
It’s my quinceañera dress. It’s supposedly very traditional to wear a white dress, like young women coming of age. For mine, I wanted to wear something that I didn’t see a lot of people wearing and I was very firm that if I didn’t find the love of my life, I was going to wear a white dress and this was my moment. My quinceañera was such a precious time. It really was a labor of love, and I think it’s one those memories I hold very near and dear. I think it’s an ode to her history, her legacy.
How long have you been a fan?
I remember I was 5 and I was running around in my neighborhood, playing with Barbies and watching “Lizzie McGuire.” I’m here today with my neighborhood and childhood friends. We used to watch it together and now we’re reliving our nostalgia and childhood.
Thinking back on when you first fell in love with her work, why does it still resonate with you today?
There’s a lot of power in her being a woman and she’s going through so many milestones that a lot of people my age are going through like having children and growing her career. Sometimes I think people “wash out” and I think it’s wonderful how she’s combating that narrative in so many ways, and that people are out here supporting her. I think there’s a lot of beauty in being able to be together as young women and relive some of these memories, but also cheer her on as she continues developing further.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Crystal Chesher, 33, of Mar Vista and Isabella Sanchez, 33, of Culver City
Tell us about your outfit.
Sanchez: We’re channeling “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” My actual name is Isabella. She gives more Lizzie vibes and I give more Isabella vibes. It’s funny because I’ve literally saved [looks] of Isabella and Lizzie on my Pinterest board and I’ve always wanted to dress up like this. It’s not 100% of what I wanted, but it’s giving what it’s supposed to.
How long have you been a fan?
Chesher: Since I was little. I remember watching “Lizzie McGuire” since the age of 10 at the very least so I’ve been growing up with her movies and shows. She’s definitely my idol.
Sanchez: Same. Growing up, I was bullied so she was a very big part of me being more positive about myself. I can relate to her and she really helped me. It just feels full circle to be able to see her at 33 when I wanted to see her when I was like 10.
Thinking back on when you first fell in love with her work, why does it still resonate with you today?
Chesher: She has a heavy influence in the LGBT community as well especially with the [anti-gay speech campaign]. I loved that. With her movies and her music, it’s all relatable and it resonates with you, the lyrics, the storyline and even her new album that just came out.
Sanchez: She’s just that girl. I’ve never even met her, but I feel like she’s so genuine and real and she’s always stayed consistent with who she is. She’s not like your typical celebrity. She’s just awesome. I’m literally probably going to tear up seeing her on stage.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Lucca Petrucci, 33, of Santa Monica
Tell us about your outfit.
This is a last-minute choice. It’s very like ’70s or retro. I feel like I’ve seen her wear something like this. I’m wearing wide-legged pants, Doc Martens, platform, new haircut, facial. The inspiration for this fit was elegant pop star like confidence, grounded, a baddie. I’m a baddie who knows my worth and that’s what I wanted to embrace. I feel like she’s like doing that. She has a lyric that’s like ‘I look in the mirror, like I’m a bad b—.”
How long have you been a fan?
Since third grade. I thought she was my crush, but I think I just wanted to be her. So many of my core childhood memories are with her.
Why was tonight a non-negotiable for you?
I wanted to experience with my bestie and her sister. I feel like as a kid I didn’t allow myself to fully embrace it because it would be too girly, too much, too gay. So I feel like as a 33-year-old, I’m reclaiming that experience. I’m so excited just to hear everybody in the Forum sing “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean.” She has always been my number one pop star, to this day, and I’ve never seen her perform.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
I feel like, especially when she was on “Lizzie McGuire,” she was figuring out who she was, but was open to being her authentic self. So I think that just like hit me when I was like in third and fourth grade, like figuring out myself. I felt so seen by her, and her music just brings back like such good feelings. Younger version of me, life wasn’t always great, but, I don’t know, she made things better.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Liv Guardado, 8, Priscilla Cruz, 38, Ava Guardado, 10 and Jezelle Velasco of Costa Mesa
Tell us about your outfit.
Cruz: We went thrifting for the first time for this. I’m plus-size, so thrifting is not easy in my size, so we did what we could. We got some overalls from Goodwill. And then we got some cowboy boots because we just wanted to be comfy.
Velasco: I probably stressed the most. I ordered so many pieces and it just kind of came together. I think the nails took the longest. One of my friends did my nails. It took some time but we got it done.
How long have you been a fan?
Velasco: Probably since I was their age. I never got to go to a concert, so this is my first time seeing her live.
Cruz: I definitely got inspired around middle school. I had a friend who was like Lizzie, and I was the best friend, Miranda. People would always say I was Miranda. I was a little older than [my girls], but I definitely have kept tabs on her life, and we love her.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Cruz: It definitely feels like memories and home when you think of her music from back then. And now she’s obviously stepped into a different phase of her life, and it matches where we’re at in our phase too so it’s nice.
Velasco: It just brings back the nostalgia from back when we were younger and now being parents, and being able to relate to her and her new music.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Paige Beard, 34, and Tayler Nelson, 27, of Bakersfield
Tell us about your outfits.
Beard: I was supposed to be wearing purple and she was going to wear green, and we were going to do the Isabella and Lizzie look at the end of “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” It turned out more pink, but we ran with it.
Nelson: I was all about that performance, so I was like green. Gotta go green. We’ve been planning for a while, like two months.
How long have you been a fan?
Beard: I’ve been a fan for a long, long time, probably since “Casper Meets Wendy.” I was also a really big “Lizzie McGuire” fan, so I got into her acting as well as her music.
Nelson: Same. I was all about the Cinderella movie though, so it’s probably been 10 years for me.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Beard: I was telling my sister that I really liked “Lizzie McGuire” because it was one of the first times I saw somebody’s inner dialogue acted out in cartoon form. It showed me that I’m not too much. She’s a little bit older than me and I see her crying on stage and I’m like “OK, it’s OK.”
Nelson: “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” was a big turning point for me. I just loved how she expressed herself with what she wore and how she acted. I feel like I understood her in different ways. I enjoyed the dancing and the singing for sure. She felt free and I’m like, “Dang, I want that.”
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Freddy Lopez, 38, and Raymond Lockwood, 36, of San Bernardino
Tell us about your outfits.
Lopez: Just a ’90s vibe. I guess a little old-school.
Lockwood: The outfits are a little last-minute because we were like we should’ve done diner girl [from “A Cinderella Story”] or one of her other movies, but we chose the little cartoon character from the show.
How long have you been a fan?
Lopez: I’ve been a fan since “Lizzie McGuire” and her movies.
Lockwood: For the past 20 something years. We grew up watching “Lizzie McGuire” and got introduced to Hilary Duff when she started singing.
Why was tonight a non-negotiable for you?
Lopez: We don’t know if she’s going to come back after this, so you’ve gotta take every opportunity. There’s other artists who cannot come back to perform right now. So when she said I’m coming back, we had to.
Lockwood: We’re healing our inner child. As a kid, we didn’t know she was having tours or we couldn’t afford to come out. Now, we’re like we don’t have to ask our mom and dad for anything.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Lockwood: For me, it’s being a teenager, watching the “Lizzie McGuire” show and watching the movie and then learning her songs. My favorite song is from the movie, “What Dreams Are Made Of.” It’s just us getting to live back in the past and kind of understanding it a little bit more. As a kid, our dreams are not what they realistically are today. I ended up becoming a nurse. As a kid, I didn’t sit on the couch like “Oh, I’m going to be a nurse,” but that’s what my dream ended up being.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Stephanie Rodriguez, 32, High Desert
Tell us about your outfit.
If you ask my fiancé, I was hunting for outfits and last-minute I was like, “I’m just gonna order something on Amazon.” When I saw this, I was like, “That’s it.” Total nostalgia with “13 Going on 30.” We went shoe shopping at the South Coast Plaza over the weekend. The metallic is pulling it all together and the butterfly clips.
How long have you been a fan?
Probably since I was like 8 or younger, pretty much very much obsessed. All of my holiday gifts were Hilary Duff. I had her K-Mart home products. Any magazines she was in, I got. Any outfits that I could try and replicate, I would. My first Hilary show was either Wango Tango or a Jingle Ball with KIIS-FM, so it was just a festival with a bunch of different artists but I went specifically for her.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
I think a lot of us feel like we grew up with Hilary, so all of her music resonated with us then, and now, now that we’re older, through relationships or divorces or motherhood. It’s pretty cool to see just how we’re all kind of growing up together. The first time I think I found out about her was at the Glendale Galleria. I was recently telling my fiancé that my dad had me on his shoulders because she did a meet and greet and the entire mall was packed.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Kelsie Wagner, 35, of Temecula and Tyler Walsh, 35, of Long Beach
Tell us about your outfit.
Wagner: I’m channeling Lizzie McGuire. My favorite part is the butterfly clips.
Walsh: This is from Company D, which is a discount store for Disneyland. I was like let me get the biggest shirt and make it into a dress, but I’m wearing shorts — it’s still appropriate. I have like six authentic Disney pins here. This is about $200 on my hat. I was like I have to do something that represents. It’s a big hobby, pin trading, that I picked up in 2023. Then I wore my Lisa Franks. I figured I would channel everything from the ’90s and 2000s.
How long have you been a fan?
Wagner: Whenever the “Lizzie McGuire” show came out.
Walsh: I remember going to sleepovers with all of my friends and we would do Lizzie nights. I was on a soccer team and on Saturday nights, we’d go watch the newest episode. It was just so fun because I feel like I had a little clan that loved Lizzie. We went to her concert at the Grove together and it was back when you paid $50 to get in. We were front row and we like smelled her. It was wonderful.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Wagner: For me, especially her new album, she talks about marriage, relationships, motherhood, so it’s still relatable in that sense of that stage of life that we’re in.
Walsh: For me, it’s just nostalgia, because I’m not married, I have no kids, like I’m that fun aunt. And I will say, like, because she goes to Disneyland a lot, so I luckily got to meet her too. I asked her for a picture, and she’s like “Yeah, of course, honey.” It’s the most embarrassing photo of me ever though.
Wagner: I told her she should get it printed and wear it to the concert.
Walsh: I should have.
Sam Raimi‘s Evil Dead films and TV series are a fine example of creativity within constraints, playfulness, self-awareness and outright slapstick comedy. The Evil Dead series after Raimi is very, very different. Starting with 2013’s Evil Dead by Fede Álvarez, followed by Evil Dead Rise by Lee Cronin, the new series takes itself more seriously and emphasises pure horror, violence and gore. Some have considered this praiseworthy as it avoids being a mere retread of the old films, but the reception has been mixed.
In Sébastien Vanicek’s Evil Dead Burn, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) loses her abusive husband (George Pullar) to a motor accident. When she goes home to stay with his family, the consequences of the work of their dead grandfather researching the Necronomicon and the Deadites manifest in terrible ways. One by one, the family are turned into the Evil Dead.
Horror is a genre that depends on you relating to the protagonists so you care what happens to them. In the case of Evil Dead Burn, Yacoub does a decent job with the character she’s given, but the gonzo horror elements manifest so early in the film that she may as well be collateral damage in the onslaught, especially as the film’s early point of view is that of her brother-in-law (Hunter Doohan).
Fans of gory violence will get their money’s worth here, but there’s not a lot going on besides that. The film is a descent into madness and carnage that is so resolutely unpleasant that, after some of the early kills, it becomes numbing. It’s hard to gather what the tone is supposed to be, with lots of callbacks to the early films’ style by setting up inevitable kills with Chekhov’s weed trimmer, Chekhov’s fork and every other potentially dangerous prop the camera lingers on. The family are all deeply unpleasant at some level and so their deaths register as meaningless. Yes, the film has the obligatory something to say about how our tendency to ignore domestic abuse creates demons that destroy families, but then absolutely panders to bloodlust by absolutely revelling in some of the most extreme violence imaginable between family members (and a pet). To say this is not a film for the sensitive is to understate things considerably. This is a film that absolutely earns its content guidance warnings.
Is there any comedy? Some, but it feels out of place given the absolute brutality inflicted on the cast. While most of the other films were self-aware about setting up a ludicrously grisly end for a villain as a payoff, in Evil Dead Burn,the kills have very little flair. It’s also hard to know what the rules for getting rid of a Deadite are, as some of them are still upright and chatty after losing most of the contents of their skull and some are dispatched by the repeated application of a blunt object to the head. Towards the end, a McGuffin is added to make the kills final, but before that, who knows?
Should you watch Evil Dead Burn,? It certainly gets vocal reactions from audiences in a cinema, and if you’re a gorehound you’ll be in for a ride. If you’re a horror fan, it’s certainly a horror film, but violent instead of scary. If you’re just a fan of cinema who likes good films whether or not they’re horror films, then this will be an alienating watch. In Evil Dead Rise the decay of the family was more than background noise and factored into the circumstances of the individual deaths, but not here. It has slight pretences of being a film with Themes and Ideas, but in the end it just feels like an excuse to serve up limbs being mutilated, skulls being crushed and any number of stabbings, slicings and gougings rendered with psychopathic visual fidelity. If that’s what you’re after, that’s what it’s got.
Entertainment
‘Children of Blood and Bone’ author won’t see film after feud with star Amandla Stenberg
Tomi Adeyemi, the author of the bestselling fantasy “Children of Blood and Bone,” isn’t planning to see the forthcoming film adaptation — even though she co-wrote it.
Over the weekend, the Nigerian American author posted a video on TikTok addressing fans who have been asking her the same question, “Why don’t you post about the adaptation of your first film adaptation anymore?”
“There is a reason I will not post anything about the adaptation of my work,” the author wrote in what appear to be screenshots of a group chat. “I have not seen the film, and I will not watch it.”
The adaptation of the first installment of Adeyemi’s “Legacy of Orïsha” fantasy trilogy is slated to hit theaters in January 2027. Gina Prince-Bythewood — who wrote and directed “Love & Basketball” and helmed “The Woman King” — is directing. The film stars Amandla Stenberg, Thuso Mbedu, Tosin Cole, Damson Idris, Cynthia Erivo, Lashana Lynch, Regina King, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Viola Davis.
Alongside the screenshots of her comments in the group chat, she shared a February 2025 exchange with Stenberg that shows the author severing ties with the actor.
Adeyemi shared only her final message to Stenberg, which reads, “Do not ever use my name in an interview or video again. Do not text me. Do not call me.” That exchange is followed by a notification that she blocked Stenberg, who plays Princess Amari in the upcoming fantasy flick.
The message from Stenberg that preceded Adeyemi’s reply is not shown in full.
Stenberg, who played Rue in “Hunger Games,” Starr Carter in “The Hate U Give” and, recently, Verosha “Osha” Aniseya and Mae-ho “Mae” Aniseya in Disney’s “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” had been getting flack from readers of the series, who claimed colorism was an issue while casting the movie.
In February 2025, Stenberg posted a since-deleted nine-minute TikTok addressing the controversy and told followers that Adeyemi had given the actor her blessing when cast as the series’ princess.
“I am four months into training for ‘Children of Blood and Bone’ and I am getting my ass whooped,” Stenberg joked in the video, per BET.
“This year was mostly defined for me, honestly, by contending with what it felt like to receive racist death threats just for existing in the ‘Star Wars’ universe, and that was a really difficult thing for me to move through,” she continued. “But honestly, it feels so much more painful for me to feel like I’m at odds with my own community.”
Stenberg said that she considers her skin tone when navigating her career choices and would “never go after a role” she didn’t feel well suited for. “I know that colorism is an insidious system that relentlessly impacts every facet of entertainment.”
The actor continued that it was actually a meeting with the “Children of Blood and Bone” author that gave her the confidence to pursue the role.
“I had the opportunity to meet Tomi, the novelist, for the first time. … And she goes, ‘Amandla, I want you to know that when you were a little girl and you were cast as Rue in “The Hunger Games,” and people said that Rue’s death wouldn’t be as sad because you’re a Black girl — that inspired me to write this series so that Black girls like you and Black girls of all shades could have a story written about them,’” Stenberg said in the video. “We started crying, and I said to myself, ‘God wants me here.’”
Representatives for Stenberg, Adeyemi and Prince-Bythewood did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
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