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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

Gladiator II

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by David Scarpa

Starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, with Connie Nielsen and Denzel Washington

Classification 14A; 148 minutes

Opens in theatres November 22

Hail Denzel Washington. He understood the assignment, as they say.

Washington, decked out in flowing gold lined robes and oversized jewels, brings his swagger and more to Ridley Scott’s gleefully inaccurate ancient Rome in Gladiator II, a creaky and bloated sequel that mostly falls flat whenever it strays from the Training Day star’s orbit.

Like Oliver Reed in the original, Washington is playing a calculated slave trader with a shady past. As Macrinus, he scans for talent among ravaged bodies, those who can hack each other to bits in the Colosseum but also be his “instrument.” The man’s hiding ulterior motives. Washington has a field day teasing them out.

He dances between lounging and lurching forward, his every posture, movement and gesture filled with intention. While so many of his peers in the cast feel like pawns reciting monologues, and often bellowing them out amidst the movie’s noise as if that would add impact, Washington negotiates with each line, like he’s searching for the music and the surprising notes of meaning in each word. He’s putting on a show. And the audience is going to love him for it.

Showmanship is of course a core tenet to the original Gladiator. Scott’s swords-and-sandals Spartacus-lite throwback, which won best picture at the 2001 Oscars, was all about playing up the theatricality in violence and even politics. Those thrilling battle sequences in the arena, with Russell Crowe’s Maximus leading diamond formations against chariots and swinging swords around with a grandiosity, looked incredible. The movie built its whole narrative around what can be achieved not just by feeding an audience’s bloodlust, but indulging it with artistry, while resoundingly asking, “Are you not entertained?”

This time around, Scott throws a lot more in the arena. CGI rhinos, apes, sharks and warships take up space in his digitally re-rendered Colosseum, but he’s at a loss with what to do with them. It’s just a bunch of pixels at war with each other, with human stakes left to bleed out.

Finding an anchor in Gladiator II’s stakes is also kind of hard since the movie undoes so much of what we were invested in as far as Maximus’s achievements in the first film, which ended with him killing Joaquin Phoenix’s prophetically Trump-like Caesar and handing control of Rome to the senate so the people can rule.

And yet here we are, finding Rome under the control of two new emperors, twins played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who basically split Phoenix’s incredible performance in two. How they came into power despite Maximus’s best efforts is barely addressed. It’s especially baffling because the two come off as a pair of clownish puppets. One of them holds conversations with a monkey.

Never mind the way Scott flouts historical accuracy – like a newspaper appearing in 200 A.D. before the invention of the printing press. Gladiator II’s betrayal of the original movie’s satisfying conclusion is even more egregious. The sequel even contradicts Maximus’s final words, which I’ll leave you to revisit.

At this point I should warn you, if you want to see Gladiator II completely unspoiled, don’t continue reading. Though if you’ve seen recent trailers, or even googled who Normal People star Paul Mescal is playing, you already know what I’m about to write.

The actor, so tender and affecting in smaller films like Charlotte Wells’s sublime Aftersun and Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, is in his beefcake-era playing a grown up Lucius, the young child of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. His life was in peril in the earlier movie because he was heir to his murderous uncle Commodus’s throne.

In Gladiator II, we meet Lucius in Numidia, a warrior battling the Roman empire, living under an assumed identity after he had been squirreled away in hiding from his family and lineage. His return to Rome, as a vengeful gladiator seeking retribution for his dead wife, rejigs the plot from the first movie, with the Maximus role now shared between Mescal’s Lucius and Pedro Pascal’s war-weary general Marcus.

Mescal and Pascal are both fine; though they often seem too overwhelmed by the tired plot machinations to really make an impression beyond how fine they both look in Roman garb. Mescal is especially distracting, his blue eyes piercing through all the dirt mingling with sweat on his face. And yes, it’s easy to be distracted by these details in a movie that never finds its footing as a spectacle or any conviction in the emotions its storytelling is supposed to conjure; except of course, when Denzel is in the room.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)

No matter the century, Saoirse Ronan is going to dance. When the four-time Academy Award nominee moves to the music in her two films this season, the fabric of a blue-striped dress or a vintage silk black top with a rose print becomes one with the choreography. Despite being set more than 70 years apart, London nightlife scenes in the World War II drama “Blitz” and “The Outrun’s” 21st century tale of alcoholism and recovery each display a 1930s influence.

In “The Outrun,” adapted by director Nora Fingscheidt from Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name, Rona is a fictional version of the author. Charting a decade or so of Rona’s life, Ronan (who also produced the film) has around 80 costume changes, from carefree partying and the subsequent spiral in Hackney to practical outerwear after moving home to the remote Orkney Islands as part of her sobriety journey. In Steve McQueen’s big-budget “Blitz,” Ronan plays resilient single mother Rita, whose 9-year-old son, George, goes missing from an evacuation train to the countryside. Like many other Londoners, Rita kept up appearances during the war.

Here, costume designers Grace Snell and Jacqueline Durran discuss how the locations and turbulence in each story inform the vibrant looks.

For the first “Outrun” fitting, Snell arrived at Ronan’s home with five suitcases of options, including a garment steeped in personal history. “This silk vest I have had for as long as I can remember in my adult life. It was given to me by my auntie,” says Snell. “It was made by my nanny in the ’80s. They’d found a piece of fabric in a jumble sale together. It’s a 1930s piece of fabric.” Snell’s aunt wore it “during her Bananarama phase,” and in the late 2000s the costume designer partied in London nightclubs wearing the same rose top. Next up, Rona.

Ahead of nature becoming a lifesaver back home on the Scottish island, florals hold significance in the city. Rona wears the ’30s silk tank when a dreamy summer day morphs into first kisses at a nightclub — before benders and breakups. “I think it was one of our first costumes that Saoirse and I were like, ‘This is it!’” Snell says. It was easy to envision its impact as “The Outrun’s” hair and makeup designer, Kat Morgan, had dyed Ronan’s hair a bold shade for the first fitting. “With the turquoise hair, I thought a monochromatic top would work brilliantly,” Snell says. In the dark nightclub, the top isn’t trying to pull focus: “It’s her face that is illuminated.”

A cozy black hoodie with a white unicorn (coincidentally, Scotland’s national animal) graphic “ties in with the myth and legend elements of the film,” appearing at low points in both locations. “You have a London wardrobe, an Orkney wardrobe, and then a crossover of a few bits that bounce around,” Snell says.

Snell pulled a coat from her father’s closet that Rona wears back home and the designer borrowed from Orkney residents: “Rona’s wellies were given to us by one of the women on the farm, and I bought her a new pair as a thank-you.” No need to walk around muddy fields for authenticity: “That’s real sheep poo.” “It was important to me that lots of the clothes were lived and worn in; clothes that people have experienced wearing in those environments,” adds Snell. Overalls, oversize knits and a faux fur hat that Snell sourced but didn’t end up using for the Tilda Swinton movie “The Eternal Daughter” are part of Rona’s contrasting rural aesthetic.

Like Rona, Rita experiences bliss on the dance floor in “Blitz.” For this pivotal, joyous moment with boyfriend Marcus (CJ Beckford), before prejudice and then war tear her family apart, Rita’s striped blue frock with a shorter hemline is typical of late ’20s-early ’30s trends: “We copied it from an original, and it was very fitted from the waist over the upper hip, and then it flared so it was good for dancing.”

Rita’s dedication to looking her best in the present, whether at work in the munitions factory or going on a night out wearing a leopard-print coat, is inspired by photographic evidence. “It was almost part of the war effort to keep the front up, to keep your appearance together as much as you could, to keep morale high,” says Durran. “Putting your best foot forward even though it’s the war.”

“Blitz” is Durran’s fourth collaboration with Ronan across 17 years since they first worked together on “Atonement.” The nine-time Oscar nominee (Durran won for “Little Women” and “Anna Karenina”) observes that Ronan “has become one of our greatest movie stars,” and a showstopping “highly tailored, bold jacket” reflects the cultural status. Inspiration from adventurous late-’30s silhouettes makes Rita stand out at the train station in a sea of children ready to evacuate. “I think that’s part of movie storytelling, but I also was very conscious that I didn’t want it to be unbelievable, even though it looks like an extraordinarily big statement,” Durran says.

Costume designer Jacqueline Durran found not everything was drab during the Blitz, red was also “in the fashion ether at the time.”

(Parisa Taghizdeh/Apple)

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Far from all Londoners falling back on dull neutrals, Durran found red was “in the fashion ether at the time”; makeup designer Naomi Donne also goes crimson for Rita’s lipstick. While the diagonal-striped jacket and skirt are custom-built, the contrasting red polka-dot blouse and shoes are vintage. Durran pushed the period-accurate look “a touch” but didn’t want to lean too glam with Rita’s headwear. “We did try some other more classic ’40s hats on,” she says. “Because we were already doing the red jacket, I wanted to play the hat down a bit.” Crochet provided the solution: “I went for a hat that felt like you could make at home.”

Using patterns from the era, “Lots of the headscarves in the factory were also crocheted.” These details show East End women “still express themselves” even in an expected uniform environment. The same applies whether on the bus, sheltering in a tube station or sorting through the rubble. “It was about London and the multiplicity of people and realities that are there,” Durran says. “I always felt that with Rita, or with any of the principals, you were just zooming in on one aspect of life in London at that moment, of which there were millions of versions.”

Depictions of the U.K. capital wildly differ in the Ronan double bill. Yet flashbacks highlight a sartorial connection within the cityscape Rita and Rona inhabit before one leaves the metropolis behind.