If “Gael Garcia Bernal as Magellan” sounds to you like a pretty cool Netflix series, you have never seen a film by Filipino auteur and slow-cinema master Lav Diaz. Known on the international festival circuit for his epically minimalist features with bladder-busting running times, his movies are challenging, high-art dramas made for a very select few — the opposite of the flashy, ADHD-friendly content found on streamers.

Premiering in Cannes, where Diaz’s most awarded film, Norte, the End of History, played in Un Certain Regard back in 2013, Magellan (Magalhães) is not for the impatient viewer who likes their explorer stories action-packed and easy to digest.

And yet this exquisitely crafted feature may be one of the director’s most accessible works to date. It clocks in at only 160 minutes (Diaz’s films often run twice that long, if not more), but, more importantly, provides an honest glimpse at a figure who famously opened the world up for exploration, while furthering the mass destruction wreaked by colonialism.

“I saw a white man!” an indigenous woman screams in the movie’s opening scene, which shows her working calmly by a river in a picturesque rain forest. Like the snake appearing in the Garden of Eden — a Biblical reference that will soon be forced upon tribes with their own religious culture — the arrival of Europeans on the shores of unexplored lands will carry evil into an innocent place, changing it for the worse.

That first sequence takes place during the Conquest of Malacca in 1511, which saw Magellan fighting under Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque. If you’re not familiar with this dark period, Diaz doesn’t necessarily make things clear enough to grasp. He’s less interested in historical facts and figures than in visually capturing what the start of colonial decimation looked like on both sides. Magellan never appears in his movie as a hero or antihero, but as a bold profiteer reaping what he can out of a global race to secure land through war and plunder. Guns, germs and steel indeed.

The narrative, which stretches from the bloody clashes on Malacca to Magellan’s death at the Battle of Mactan (Philippines) ten years later, portrays this decade of conquest and ruination with elegantly composed tableaux shot from a fixed position. Diaz is known for using black-and-white, but here he teams with Artur Tort (credited as both co-cinematographer and co-editor) to shoot with a rich color palette of green, brown and blue, finding beautifully detailed textures in locations on both sea and land. The villages recreated by production designers Isabel Garcia and Allen Alzola seem so authentic that you would think they had always been there, nestled in the jungle.

Certain images look like they were torn right out of 16th-century paintings, which is why Magellan is a movie you tend to gaze at rather than watch with full attention. Diaz often shows us the aftermath of battles, where dozens of bodies are artfully splayed on the ground, instead of the battles themselves. Lots of other drama happens off-screen, even if we do witness certain key moments from Magellan’s last years — whether it’s his decision to work under the Spanish crown after the Portuguese refused to back his last voyage, or his discovery of a passage to the South Pacific that became known as the Magellan Strait.

But the drama can be very stolid, borderline dull at times. Not that Garcia Bernal isn’t perfect for the part: Costumed in lots of fluffy shirts, he plays a fearless man with an immense ego who suffered for his success, making the whole profession of being a conquistador look less like a valiant enterprise than a major drag. But Diaz’s observant style (he never cuts within a scene; there’s no music to induce emotion) can keep us at arm’s length from events. Perhaps the most dramatic part of the film is the one that’s the most painfully stretched out, depicting Magellan’s long, relentless voyage (1519-1521) from Spain to the Spice Islands, which saw many crew members die along the way.

But whatever the Spaniards or Portuguese went through pales in comparison to all the tribespeople whom we see imprisoned, converted, enslaved or just plain murdered by Magellan and his men. The other main character in the film is Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), an indigenous man whom Magellan captures on Malacca and takes with him on all his subsequent journeys. He gradually becomes “civilized” (to use a colonialist term) as the narrative progresses, until the tides turn in the Philippines and we see him returning back to his initial state, freed from the shackles of European domination.

As much as Magellan is a film that will play to a highly select audience, it makes a subtle but loud political statement about the colonial mindset both then and now. When the conquistadors claim they are fighting so that “Islam shall finally disappear,” hoping to beat the Moors in securing more territory, it sounds a lot like speeches you hear from far-right pundits and politicians in Europe today. Diaz’s movie may resemble a magnificent time capsule — and one that we watch with a certain distance — but there are moments when its stark realism reminds us how easily history can repeat itself.

Academy Award winner Billy Bob Thornton, who plays chain-smoking crisis manager Tommy Norris in Taylor Sheridan’s latest hit “Landman,” seems like a guy who can’t be intimidated. But get him in a room with Allison Janney and the truth comes out.

“I was afraid of you,” he tells her sheepishly on The Envelope’s Emmy Roundtable for drama actors.

“Really?” says Janney, the Oscar-, Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning performer who appears as cunning Vice President Grace Penn on the Netflix political thriller “The Diplomat.”

“The first time I met Allison, it was at another press function thing,” he says to the room. “And just seeing you, as an actor, and parts you play … But also, you have this very dignified quality about you.”

“It’s my height, I think.”

“No,” he continues. “You just have the face of someone who is powerful and really intelligent. So some idiot like me comes in, and I’m like, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t talk to her.’”

This is what happens when you gather seven Emmy contenders whose performances so convincingly shape our perceptions of who they are in real life. This year’s group also included Sterling K. Brown, who plays Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent seeking the truth in Hulu’s “Paradise”; Britt Lower, who plays both wealthy heiress Helena Eagan and defiant data refiner Helly R. in Apple TV+’s “Severance”; Jason Isaacs, who plays Timothy Ratliff, an American financier desperately trying to keep a secret from his family in HBO’s “The White Lotus”; Noah Wyle, who plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior attending physician at a Pittsburgh trauma center in Max’s “The Pitt”; and Kaitlin Olson, who plays the underestimated but brilliant police consultant Morgan Gillory in ABC’s “High Potential.”

Read on for excerpts from our discussion about how they tap into their layered performances, navigate the business and more — and watch video of the roundtable below.

Tell me about an “Oh, my God, did that just happen?” moment — good or bad — from your early years on a Hollywood set. Kaitlin, your first credit was “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I can’t imagine what it’s like making Larry David laugh.

Olson: Oh, you just have to scream in his face and insult him, and then he thinks that’s really, really funny. But yeah, there were no marks and there were no lines. So I didn’t really have an “Oh, my God” moment. You just talk and shut up when you should shut up.

Isaacs: On my first day [on 1989’s “The Tall Guy”], I remember I arrived first thing in the morning. I was playing Surgeon No. 2 in a dream sequence that Jeff Goldblum was in. The director, who’s hassled and busy, he goes, “OK, we’re going to start with you. We’re coming in on the dolly. But because I’m on a very wide lens, if you could start the eyeline somewhere near the bottom of the jib and then just go to the corner of bottle, then take it to the edge of the matte box when we’re getting close.” And I went, “Right … What the f— did any of those words mean?” Jeff is just out of frame. And he’s in his underpants, and it’s a dream sequence for him. And we’re just about to go and roll the cameras, and Jeff goes, “Hold on a second.” And he stands up and he starts standing on a chair reciting Byron love poems even though he was not in the shot. I’m like, “I don’t understand what the hell is going on here.” Years later, I sat next to him at a wedding and I said, “Do you remember that night?” He went, “Yeah.”

Jason Isaacs of “The White Lotus.”

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Have there been moments where you fell out of love with acting or where you felt like, “This isn’t working out”?

Janney: My career didn’t start till I was 38 or something, because I’m so tall, and I was literally uncastable. I went to the Johnson O’Connor [Research Foundation]. And I did three days of testing to see what else I could possibly do.

Issacs: What is that?

Janney: It’s an aptitude testing place. They ask you to do all this stuff, and at the end of it they say, “This is what you should be.” And they told me I should be a systems analyst. I had no idea what that was. And the next day, I got cast understudying Faith Prince and Kate Nelligan in “Bad Habits,” a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Allison Janney of “The Diplomat.”

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Brown: I’ve never fallen out of love with it. I was an economics major in college who wound up switching to drama. When I got out of grad school and [was] hopping around through regional theater, I wound up booking a TV show, “Army Wives,” for six years, and a few years into the show, I was like, “I think I’ve done everything that I want to do with the character.” So when they came dangling the carrot for people to reup after Season 6, I was like, “I’m curious to see what else the universe has in store.” I was able to pay off student loans. We had our first child, I had a home and I was like, “Let’s take a gamble on Brown.” I did a pilot for AMC that didn’t get picked up; then had a recurring [role] on “Person of Interest” for six episodes. I was like, “Oh, man, I got a wife and a kid and a house. Did I mess up? Should I have stayed on the show or not?”

Then I auditioned for [“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”], and I didn’t hear anything for four months. I was down in New Mexico shooting this movie, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” and I was having this really sort of morbid moment of going through my IMDb Pro account and looking at everybody who had booked all of the things that I had auditioned for. I was like, “Oh, Bokeem Woodbine booked Season 2 of ‘Fargo.’ Good for him.” And I got a call from my manager saying, “They want you to screen test with Sarah Paulson for this thing.” I was the only person that they brought in to audition for it.

Sterling K. Brown of “Paradise.”

Your series are largely confronting or commenting on real-world anxieties or subjects that are changing in our world in real time. Noah, with Dr. Robbie and what he says about what’s going on in the healthcare system — we’re seeing him cope with the aftermath of COVID-19. We’re seeing stories that are very timely about vaccinations. Talk about what was important to you with this series and what you wanted to show through these characters.

Wyle: “ER” was very much a patient-centric show in a lot of ways. And this was more of an exercise to be practitioner- and physician-centric, to really show the toll that the last five years since COVID has taken on that community. The thesis being that it is as fragile as the mental health of the people that we have in those jobs and the quality’s what we received. Even though we had to peer into a crystal ball and try to figure out a year ago what would be the topical cases of today, we were really more interested in how everybody’s coping mechanisms have allowed them to practice what they’ve been doing for the last five years. How they’ve compartmentalized the toll it’s taken on them personally, and explore that in real time. Aggregate tension on a shift where you’re just embedded with them without release. The outset was more about identifying the mental health of the practitioner than identifying the ills in society … Can I just say how effing cool it is to sit at this table with you all and be the uncool one to say that I feel like my impostor syndrome is off the rails right now?

Olson: No way.

Noah Wyle of “The Pitt.”

Hopefully you’ll all guest star on each other’s shows by the time this is over.

Janney: I would love that.

Britt, what really spoke to me about “Severance” was its exploration of grief, but within that too, there’s the corporate overreach and the work-life balance that I think all of us can appreciate. Did it show you anything about how you navigate your work-life balance or what you could do better?

Lower: The cast talks a lot about how the “Severance” procedure is kind of like what we do for a living. We go to work and put on a different outfit and assume a new identity. There were some moments where you’re walking down the corridors on the way to your job, and there’s kind of this meta quality of being inside of a show about compartmentalizing and switching into a different part of yourself. But I think it’s so relatable. I think we do that as humans. We show up differently in different spaces in our lives, whether it’s work or home or going home for the holidays, versus your baseball team. You just put on a different person really.

Britt Lower of “Severance.”

Isaacs: If I go away to do a job on location somewhere, I can actually — even at my ripe old age; I’m a father and I’m a husband — just park my life and forget that. Now I see that metaphor very clearly and it’s irresponsible. I’m so much more comfortable in the fictitious world than I am in the real world.

Do you feel like there’s a misconception that you guys are just all at the pool?

Isaacs: I’m not really an actor anymore; I just do “White Lotus” publicity for a job. And in the billions of interviews, people expect you to say, “It was a holiday. We were in this resort.” Well, we’re not really in the resort. So I’ve said a few times, “You make friends. You lose friends, romances or whatever; things happen between departments and all the backstage drama that we’re all used to.” Well, the online world went mad trying to deconstruct, trying to work out who knew who and who was [doing what]. Actually, I’m talking about all the crew and all the departments — not that it’s anyone’s business. But it’s trying to deconstruct what we all think of each other. And what happened there is so much less interesting than Mike White’s brilliant stories. You shouldn’t be interested in who went to dinner with who. I kind of wish I hadn’t opened my mouth about it, but I don’t want to pretend it was a holiday. Not just the way that the show blew up but also the level of microscopic interest in anything any of us said, tweeted, posted — there aren’t many new experiences for actors who’ve been around a long time, but this one has been shocking, and I’m quite glad that it’s abating now. I’d like to return to my normal life, but I don’t know how people who are uber-famous deal with it.

Billy Bob, how did you come to navigate it? You’ve experienced the extreme effects of that.

Thornton: You mean in the world of Hollywood and all that?

Isaacs: Do you go to the supermarket, take the subway … Do you do the stuff I do?

Thornton: It depends on what year it is. I’ve gone through times where I couldn’t go anywhere. Once my life got bigger, and that really happened with … I mean, I was a working actor doing OK, but “Sling Blade” is the one that, literally overnight, it was a crazy thing. From that point on, it’s been pretty steady. What I’ve done to not get involved in all that is I don’t really go anywhere. I’m either working or I’m at home with the family or in a recording studio or on the road. You don’t see me in the [tabloid] magazines, at the parties and all that kind of stuff.

I’ll put it this way. Right now, with “Landman,” we thought it was going to be successful. We had no idea that it was going to be like this. I mean, we’ve got fans in Iceland and stuff. I can’t go to a Walmart in Texas. It’s literally impossible. I tried it. I would walk three feet at a time. Texans, their personalities are also very big, and they don’t really come up and go, “Excuse me, mister.” It’s not like that. It’s like, “Hey man, what’s going on? Get in a picture with me.”

I’ve had a reputation — weirdo. Angelina and I were vampires. We drank each other’s blood. You look on the internet, and there’s some kind of thing you’re trying to look up and, inevitably, it’ll show something else. So you go, “I hate this. I hate the internet, but I got to see it.”

Billy Bob Thornton of “Landman.”

Isaacs: There’s no good version of you. You either look much better on the screen or much better in real life. I wanted to say [looks at Allison], because I was a huge “West Wing” fan, I did some “West Wing,” I couldn’t break out of thinking that Bradley [Whitford] and Janel [Moloney] were, in fact, Josh and Donna. Did people think you were that political? People assumed you were that character?

Janney: I’ve been such a disappointment for people who think that I am C. J. [Cregg, her character on “The West Wing”], because I couldn’t be less like her. I’m not that person who’s able to verbally cut someone down in the second that she needs to. It was so great to play her, but I remember when they had the Democratic National [Convention] in California and there were more people who came up to me and asked me, “After this is over, will you come work for us? Will you come to…” I’m like, “You don’t understand. I’m so not like that.” And now on “The Diplomat,” playing the president of the United States and the smartest person in the room, it’s so much fun for me to play those kind of women because I’m not [like that]. I mean, I’m not an idiot, but I know nothing about being in the world of politics or being manipulative.

Kaitlin, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is in its 17th season now. You’re on “Hacks.” When you’re signing on to something like “High Potential,” what factors do you consider when thinking about how long you want to commit to something?

Olson: I don’t ever want to play a character that starts to get old to me. “Sunny” doesn’t feel like that to me because it’s a satire and the world’s always providing us with new content. And we do eight to 10 episodes a season. So it’s 17 seasons, which is insane, but it’s not even 20 episodes. It’s so much fun, which is the reason I’m not sick of that character yet. But I feel the same way as you, [Allison], when I’m playing characters who are super-smart, and then I have to talk about it, I just go into panic mode.

How has it been getting into Morgan’s head?

Olson: I love the other characters that I play, but there’s heart to this, and she’s a good mom and she is very insecure but puts on a big show. I love that she’s scrappy and has to figure it out, and she trusts that she will and doesn’t rely on anybody else to help her figure it out. The most important thing are her kids. I think she’s just fascinating to play.

Kaitlin Olson of “High Potential.”

What’s the most impressive skill you picked up on the job? Noah, you know I’m going to start with you. You went to medical boot camp. You’ve done really well with sutures. You can intubate any one of us, I think.

Wyle: I’ve never performed one.

Isaacs: The night is young.

Wyle: I wish everybody an opportunity to slip into a role that you have such great muscle memory with from another aspect of your life when you play a musician or when you do circusing or whatever. When you do something you’ve done for so long, and then you get to do it again, it is just amazing how much it’s in your body and how you don’t have to worry about that stuff. There was a moment earlier where Sterling choked on the grape in the greenroom. I was so ready to intubate him, even if it wasn’t necessary.

Thornton: I went to air-traffic control school for “Pushing Tin,” so I can still say, “Delta 2376, turn left, 20-0-4-0” and “Clear the Alice approach one-four right, call the tower one-eight-three,” because you just don’t forget it. That’s not air-traffic control, that’s just a line. With Noah, he learns this skill that he has been doing over the years, and that kind of knowledge is invaluable. Anytime you have stuff to do, without just acting, like you’re doing busy work — you’re, like, here’s how you do an appendectomy — and you learn and when you’re picking up the right tools, you’re saying the right stuff, you’re making incisions — that stuff you’ve got to learn.

Isaacs: One of the great privileges of being an actor that maybe doesn’t show up onscreen is you get to walk in people’s shoes. I shadowed heart surgeons and plastic surgeons and politicians and criminals and soldiers, and it’s just an amazing privilege to be in people’s lives and talk about it. And there may be some tiny bit you pick up for the screen.

Directed by the late Sangeeth Sivan, the story revolves around a group of friends—played by Shreyas Talpade, Dinker Sharma, Dherendra Kumar Tiwari, and Sonia Rathee—who begin playing a dangerous game with an ouija board, unknowingly summoning the spirit of Anamika. Word spreads fast, and soon there’s a long queue of people eager to get answers from the spirit—ranging from revelations about someone’s father’s real identity to solving petty domestic mysteries like stolen jewellery.

But things soon spiral out of control. How the group handles the chaos that follows forms the rest of the plot.

Kapkapiii, a remake of the 2023 Malayalam film Romancham, starts off as harmless fun. We’ve seen enough buddy comedies to know the tropes—a token drunk, a scaredy-cat—and they’re all present here. The problem is that Kapkapiii thinks it’s funnier than it actually is. Written by Kumar Priyadarshi and Saurabh Anand, the story gets increasingly convoluted. A tenant who fancies one of the guys is thrown in. Then comes a gangster, played by Dibyendu Bhattacharya. After the intermission, Tusshar Kapoor joins the gang, and from that point, it’s hard to track where the film is even headed. We get “chadar mod” and “len ke bode” in the name of jokes. Eventually, you stop laughing—and even stop feeling scared. You just sit there like a zombie—expressionless.

Shreyas Talpade is the anchor of this sinking ship. He’s the only one who truly understands the comic timing the genre demands, but with limited material, there’s only so much he can do. Tusshar Kapoor’s character is confusing—you’re never sure why he’s even in the film. Every actor tries, which is both reassuring and a little sad. Reassuring because at least there’s effort. Sad because, despite that, you’re bored.

The jump scares are minimal, and that’s about all you get.

The music by Ajay Jayanthi is a miss.

In the end, Kapkapiii is a classic case of wasted potential—a film that wants to be a quirky horror-comedy but ends up being neither spooky nor funny. It leans too heavily on tired tropes, underdeveloped subplots, and a scattered screenplay.