Aasif Mandvi, one of the leads in a new production of “Waiting for Godot” opening Thursday at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse, is sitting on a couch, recalling the dearth of roles for South Asian actors in 2003, when he played a Taliban minister in Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” Mandvi’s co-star, Rainn Wilson, leans in.
“I thought you were Cuban!” Wilson deadpans.
Mandvi doesn’t miss a beat.
“I’ve told you a million times, I’m not Cuban,” he says with mock exasperation.
“You could play Cuban,” Wilson says.
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“I’ve played Cuban, but I’m not Cuban,” Mandvi says.
“You should change your name, you really should,” Wilson persists. “Like, Antonio Mandivosa. You would work nonstop.”
Mandvi shakes his head, ribbing Wilson right back.
“You’re so white right now,” he says.
They both laugh.
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The two men are in the midst of recounting their early days in theater, when Wilson didn’t make more than $17,000 annually for years and Madvi toured Florida with a production of “Aladdin” for kids so young they occasionally peed their pants during the performance.
Aasif Mandvi photographed at Geffen Playhouse in October.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
For his first show in New York, Mandvi played Hector in Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The production took place at the back of a restaurant in Brooklyn, and the audience consisted of maybe a dozen people. The mother of the guy who played Troilus made all the costumes, Mandvi recalled, and so he came out onstage with a cardboard sword with a crease in it.
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“I’d been through drama school, I was a professional!” Mandvi says with a laugh. “It was the most insane thing. But this is to say that you just get onstage and do whatever you can to get seen, to build your résumé.”
It’s funny to think of a time when either actor still needed to build his résumé. As two of modernist theater’s most iconic misfits — Vladimir (Wilson) and Estragon (Mandvi) — the actors will take the stage as bona fide stars. Although Wilson will always be associated with the gullible and weaselly Dwight Schrute on NBC’s “The Office,” and Mandvi recently won a devoted fan following for his portrayal of the science-minded skeptic Ben Shakir in “Evil” on Paramount+, both men refer to theater as their first — and biggest — love.
“The entire reason I came to Los Angeles, and I am not even exaggerating one iota, is I knew that if I ever wanted to play Mercutio at the Public Theater, I was gonna need to be on a TV show,” Wilson says. “That’s just the reality of New York theater. They want to sell tickets.”
Rainn Wilson at Geffen Playhouse on Oct. 29, 2024.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
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Wilson has stayed in L.A., but he still talks about going back with the goal of playing some of those great roles. Which is why he jumped at the chance to work on “Waiting for Godot.” He performed a scene from the play in acting class at the University of Washington in 1986 and ended up marrying his scene partner, writer Holiday Reinhorn. Since then, he’d always dreamed of revisiting it. Mandvi also performed “Godot” in acting class long ago, and the play has long been on his bucket list.
The Geffen production is exciting to both actors because it’s presented in association with the Irish theater company Gare St Lazare Ireland, which specializes in Beckett’s work.
“I’ve rarely been this challenged before as an actor,” Wilson says. “I played Hamlet in college, and I will say this is harder because everything is subject to interpretation.”
Wilson throws out an example. He has a line in the middle of the play that reads, “In an instant, all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more in the midst of nothingness.”
“You could play that line with all the darkness and sincerity that you can muster, and it might really strike a chord in the the heart of the audience, or you could put a tiny little spin on it and get a big laugh,” he said, thinking about it for a moment. “Yeah, and I’m not sure which way I’m even gonna go with that right now.”
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Beckett wrote “Waiting for Godot” in the late 1940s after World War II, during which he was part of the French Resistance. The play, which centers on two ragtag characters waiting in vain for a man named Godot, delivers some of 20th century theater’s most closely parsed lines. It premiered in1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris and ever since has been endlessly analyzed and explained by academics, critics and theater lovers bent on uncovering its meaning.
“It presumes the ultimate thesis, which is, we don’t know what we’re doing here, or why we’re here,” Mandvi says. “We just pass the time.”
Mandvi and Wilson are the same age, 58, and shared the same agent in the mid-’90s when they were starting out, but they had never worked together.
“It just sounded like a blast, right?” Mandvi says. “ I was like, ‘Oh, I get to work with Rainn who I’ve always admired and watched and —’”
“Been oddly attracted to,” Wilson interrupts.
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Mandvi nods slowly.
“Been oddly attracted to,” he repeats before adding emphatically, “which has really diminished.
“He’s one of the few people where the more you know him, the less you like him,” Mandvi continues. “The less you lust, I should say.”
“It’s true,” Wilson agrees.
Up next, the actors suggest: A mashup of “The Office” and “Evil” where the Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. is haunted. Hollywood producers, take note.
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‘Waiting for Godot’
Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; ends Dec. 15
Tickets: $49-$159
Information: (310) 208- 2028 or geffenplayhouse.org
Satya Dev’s upcoming heist drama, Zebra, is set for a grand release tomorrow, with the actor expressing high hopes for its success. Kannada star Daali Dhananjaya plays a pivotal role alongside Satya Dev.
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To build anticipation, the makers recently released a sneak peek and hosted a special show for a select audience. The latest update reveals that the film’s runtime has been set at 164 minutes (2 hours and 44 minutes), which may feel a bit lengthy for a heist thriller. It remains to be seen how well the film engages its audience.
The movie also stars Priya Bhavani Shankar, Sathyaraj, Amrutha Iyengar, and others. Produced by OldTown Production and Padmaja Films Private Limited, the film’s music is composed by Ravi Basrur, known for his work on KGF.
My first memory of Ted Danson is of him dancing solo to Frank Sinatra in a pool of light on a pier in the movie “Body Heat,” which is all I remember of “Body Heat.”
It set a tone of gracefulness that continues to inform his performances to this day, in a wide range of soft-spoken modes, from “Cheers” to “Bored to Death” to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” to “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where he appears as a version of himself. He mostly plays comedy, because that’s what a likable actor is liable to be asked to do, but he can work against type with the best of them, as he did as a corrupt billionaire in “Damages.”
That Danson, assumed to be an angel, turned out to be a devil in the first season finale of “The Good Place,” was a massive fake-out that depended on subverting our expectations, not only of his character but also of the actor himself. (That the character became a force for good felt almost inevitably on brand.) He works all the time, and yet one greets every new appearance with a sort of grateful excitement, as if he had been away somewhere for years.
The latest Danson series is “A Man on the Inside,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, but it is in most every other respect a classic NBC Thursday night comedy. It comes from Michael Schur, who created “The Good Place” (a classic NBC Thursday night comedy), with which it shares a philosophical bent, playing with questions of mortality and morality and the meaning of life, explicitly but not pedantically. It’s sweet and serious, and as the series goes on, knockabout comedy makes room for poignancy. But it never stops being funny.
Danson plays Charles, a well-to-do retired professor of engineering, who after a year is still mourning his late wife. Without work or friends — a dramatic convenience that will allow him to find both — he has settled into a comfortable rut, amplifying what we’re to understand is a reserved, cerebral nature; he’s fascinated by facts and figures, but less good with people. He has a daughter, Emily (a marvelous Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who lives a couple hours away with husband Joel (“Good Place” vet Eugene Cordero) and three comically unresponsive kids — Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert, oddly brilliant doing essentially nothing. Charles and Emily love one another without being exactly close. She’d like her father to get back into the swing of life, to un-retire or find a hobby, instead of merely mailing her articles he’s clipped from a newspaper. The paper newspaper!
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In “A Man on the Inside,” Charles (Ted Danson) has a daughter named Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and three comically unresponsive grandchildren, Nico (Lincoln Lambert, left), Wyatt (Wyatt Yang) and Jace (Deuce Basco).
(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)
It’s in the newspaper that he comes across a classified ad, reading: “Wanted, Investigative Assistant, Male 75-85, Must have phone.” This brings him to the office of Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), a private investigator whose client (Marc Evan Jackson, also from “The Good Place”) has hired her to look into the theft of his mother’s ruby necklace from her room in a posh San Francisco retirement home. Julie needs a senior citizen to go undercover in that “closed ecosystem” — that is, closed to her — to collect information, identify suspects and report back.
The premise seems improbable, yet the series is based on a 2020 Chilean documentary feature titled “The Mole Agent,” which tells just such a tale. That Charles is, at least to begin with, what Julie calls “the best option in a sea of not very good options,” is of course the point, and the starting point. The bumbling spy is a reliable comic figure, and Charles, masking ill-conceived lies with more ridiculous ones, would seem weird to anyone taking him at face value — if it were any other face than Danson’s.
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At the Pacific View retirement community, Julie poses as Charles’ daughter, and when Emily arrives unexpectedly, he introduces her to the director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), as “my niece … Julie,” adding an extra layer to the farce. (“My brother, um, had a child, and it grew into her,” he’ll say, making a later awkward introduction.) Emily is skeptical of the whole arrangement — “You know, reading a bunch of Sue Grafton novels doesn’t make you a detective,” she tells her father — but it will also, as it bumps along, bring them closer together. It’s that kind of show.
As a person in his late 70s — Danson is 76 — one would say that Charles is a fish only half out of water in this environment; in his erect bearing and chiseled-profile, lead-actor handsomeness, he remains subtly distinct from his peers. Which is not to say that they’re a sedentary crew: Charles finishes his first night drunk — happy hour begins at 3 p.m. — and stoned, and he wakes up in the morning with two slices of pizza stuck to his back. (“Thank God,” he says to Julie, who has roused him from hungover sleep. “I’m starving.”)
The series also stars Margaret Avery as Florence, left, and Sally Struthers as Virginia.
(Netflix)
Sally Struthers, who doesn’t get as many meaty roles as she deserves, is Virginia, flirty and forward. (“You are tall” are her first words to Charles.) Elliott (John Getz) regards Charles as competition. An affecting Susan Ruttan plays Gladys, a gentle, former costume designer, forgetting things. Solitary Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) proves a temperamental match for Charles. Florence (Margaret Avery) tempts him into reading Shakespeare, which goes over his head. (Significantly, he’s assigned the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from “As You Like It,” in which life’s last age is described as “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”) And I was glad to see Veronica Cartwright among the crowd, as well — a minor role, but, still, it’s Veronica Cartwright.
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From the beginning of his learning curve, Charles charges ahead with a mixture of professional determination, childlike glee and scientific precision — finding the atmosphere “rife with secrets, grudges, interpersonal issues.” He compiles thick dossiers on everyone — when not questioning his fitness for the job. But even as he gets the hang of the work, he becomes more interested in the people than the case. He forges bonds and makes friends, which Julie warns him against. “Being a spy means being lonely,” she says, missing the point of the series she’s in.
While it isn’t as rich and strange as “The Good Place,” “A Man on the Inside” is nevertheless a pleasure on most every level, and, as before, Schur wants more than just to make you laugh. To the extent that it’s sentimental, it’s also clear-eyed, genuine and conceptually rigorous.
Many of us will have had the experience of managing older parents, or trying to. Many of us are old ourselves. Death waits offstage here, in plain sight. All these septuagenarian actors are still working, with years of experience and shelves of awards among them, at the top of their game — even if the people they play are not. In a sense, they’re just pretending to be old.
Directed by Amber Sealey. Starring Phoebe-Rae Taylor, Jennifer Aniston, Rosemarie DeWitt, Luke Kirby, Judith Light, Emily Mitchell, Michael Chernus, Courtney Taylor, Catherine McNally, Kate Moyer, Maria Nash, Jeff Roop, Sharron Matthews, Kim Huffman, Ian Ho, Gabriela Francis, Gavin MacIver-Wright, Maya Lee O’Connor, Nicholas Fry, Miley Haik, Lauren Plech, Nylan Parthipan, Pip McCallan, Isaak Bailey, Christian Rose, Cristiano Buchanan, Anabelle Dietl, and Mia Burke.
SYNOPSIS:
Melody Brooks is navigating sixth grade as a nonverbal wheelchair user who has cerebral palsy. With the help of some assistive technology and her devoted allies, Melody shows that what she has to say is more important than how she says it.
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Born with cerebral palsy, Melody Brooks (played by Phoebe-Rae Taylor, also born with that condition and unquestionably a significant key to the authenticity on display) is a nonverbal wheelchair user. She is also knowledgeable with ambitions and has a lot to say, but she is limited to communicating through a board attached to her wheelchair tray (a slight, realistic touch that most films about disability seem to ignore the existence of for some inexplicable reason) containing a chart of basic sentences, thoughts, feelings, and moods for simple expression.
Directed by Amber Sealey (from a screenplay by Daniel Stiepleman and based on the novel by Sharon M. Draper), Out of My Mind mainly works because it understands that giving Melody a Medi-Speak device (an electronic tool that reads off whatever is prompted, while also coming with preprogrammed basic phrases and sentences, read aloud in the usual generic computerized voices) won’t entirely solve the problem if everyone from the school faculty to her friends and immediate family vary in their struggles to listen to those words. The issues raised stem from society and the education system, not the disability itself. That’s not to say electronic voice communicators are useless. A voice is a voice, and her father Chuck’s (Luke Kirby) reaction to hearing her daughter “speak” for the first time in which he lets the waterworks flow is a heartstrings-pulling moment that doesn’t ring false.
However, even he sometimes misses the point and gets so caught up discussing what’s best for Melody with his wife, Diane (Rosemarie DeWitt), that they both end up ignoring her in the heat of the moment. He does happen to be the more forward-minded of the parents, as fearless as his daughter is about enrolling into a standard 6th-grade class rather than overachieving in special education. If expectations are already met, why not raise the bar? That alone feels like a mantra most disabled people already live by, consistently feeling the need to prove themselves to able-bodied people who can’t even be bothered to learn that they don’t have to talk to someone in a wheelchair with an awkwardly kind, pitiful tone. Nevertheless, Diane is the helicopter parent raising justifiable concerns over ostracism and bullying.
As for the speaking device, what Melody chooses to say first is equally moving, as it encapsulates and sums up the frustrations and misunderstandings she has felt, even from her family, her whole life. It’s also important to point out that the film isn’t vilifying the parents; caring for a disabled child is tricky, will wear anyone down, and inadvertently cause those miscommunications, or lack thereof. Despite one or two powerful scenes of them standing up for Melody, whether it be from an ablest school system (including a teacher played by Michael Chernus who is technically qualified at the job but is immensely punchable when it comes to his ableism and treating Melody’s classroom presence as a distraction and nuisance), the film primarily sticks with her perspective, sprinkling in some inner thoughts using the voice of Jennifer Aniston.
It’s a device used sparingly, thankfully not overdone. As for why Jennifer Aniston, Melody loves watching Friends, but one is eager to know if that’s also a choice from the book or one encouraged by Phoebe-Rae Taylor. From little details such as classroom desks placed too close together for wheelchairs to fit through the aisles, classmates feeling an awkward pressure of losing “cool” status if they are caught giving friendship a chance with Melody, and grossed-out glances her way as eating messier foods becomes, well, messy to her face, the film understands the pitfalls of public and social disabled life. Again, maybe that’s already in the novel or screenplay, but it can’t be overstated enough that when filmmakers cast disabled actors, it comes with extra layers of authenticity and insight.
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Remember that this is still a Disney+ production, so the material has a sanitized, sentimental feel while broadly playing every narrative beat. Once a nationwide quiz competition comes into play, the narrative’s focus shifts there, perhaps too much, even if it still explores Melody’s othering by some of her peers and that enraging teacher. Bluntly put, it all becomes too plot-focused and even contrived. Feel-good songs also repeatedly pop up to remind viewers that the material will never get too challenging. However, a film is sometimes so well-meaning and educationally beneficial that such saccharine material is worth overlooking. Out of My Mind offsets that with a huge heart and a dignified, optimistic, touching performance from Phoebe-Rae Taylor.
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
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