Thinking back on the last two years of his life full of album releases, filming schedules and tour dates, Finn Wolfhard requires squint-inducing concentration to keep it all straight.

“Jesus, a lot has happened,” he says, looking surprised. That’s an understatement.

In that time, the 23-year-old not only finished filming the Netflix hit show “Stranger Things,” which catapulted him to global stardom, and promoted the final season upon its premiere. He also released his feature film directorial debut (“Hell of a Summer,” co-directed with Billy Bryk, which hit theaters in April 2025). Then, he starred in another movie (A24’s creature feature “The Legend of Ochi”), directed a posthumous George Harrison stop-motion music video, wrote, recorded and put out his first solo album (“Happy Birthday”), and embarked on a 22-date tour before recording a new album.

On a video call from his family home in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives with his parents and older brother, he’s chatting about the release of that record, the eclectic, guitar-driven “Fire From the Hip,” which dropped Friday.

“I think it’s a nice day?” he offers when I ask what’s happening in Vancouver. “I don’t know. I’ve been in my basement studio all day, so I don’t … I think it’s nice.”

He’s been down in the basement doing press calls like this, he explains, undoubtedly a familiar routine after so many years in the limelight. He wears a baseball cap and an oversize brown sweater, tugging on the sleeves while he ponders.

Even if Wolfhard is exhausted by the press marathon, he doesn’t show it. He’s excited for the chance to be known on his own terms. He never fails to express gratitude for the projects that afforded him recognition and opportunity, but he’s ready to “take control of the narrative.”

“I spent my whole childhood standing on marks that other people told me to stand on and saying lines that other people told me to say,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I want to make my own stuff?”

Being in control also means being the face of the operation. Before “Happy Birthday” and “Fire From the Hip,” Wolfhard released a total of two records and an EP, plus a whole bunch of singles, with his previous bands, Calpurnia and the Aubreys. Being in a band was a natural fit for Wolfhard, who thrives in an ensemble where he can “hide behind the band name.”

Touring last year was his first time seeing his own name on the marquee.

“It’s just straight up me, and if I suck, I suck,” he laughs. “It’s not like I can be like, ‘Oh, man, we’re having disagreements in the band.’ It’s like, no, that’s you. So there was a little more pressure early on.”

Stepping into the spotlight required Wolfhard, who admits he shies away from conflict, to own both the pressure and the power of being the one audiences came to hear.

When he got sick and had to cancel a show in Portland, Ore., he remembers feeling crushingly sad “letting down” his fans and bandmates — who, of course, assured him it was outside of his control and urged him not to be so hard on himself.

Wolfhard introduced many of the songs that ended up becoming “Fire From the Hip” to his bandmates while they were still on tour, and he says playing them live “cultivated the spirit” of the eventual recordings. Despite his collaborative ethos, there was a moment during the process where he had to learn how to put his foot down in real time.

“I remember suggesting something and people being like, ‘Ah, I don’t know if I want to do that.’ And I was like, ‘No, you don’t get to do that to me. It’s my record,’” he remembers. “It was very innocent — I don’t think there was much ego on either side. But I think I maybe set up too collaborative of an experience that day.”

“I think I sometimes make it feel like a democracy, which it is in a lot of ways,” he adds. “But also, in the end, it is up to me.”

That thought is echoed in the album’s cover art, an image of two miniature Finn Wolfhards facing off, donning colonial garb and brandishing weapons. It’s meant to represent dueling impulses inside of him, he explains.

Wolfhard, a true-blue music nerd, has been described online as an archetypical example of the “child of a Gen X cool dad,” in the same vein as Olivia Rodrigo. (His dad, a former screenwriter turned lawyer and Indigenous rights researcher, does sound cool, but it was his mom who first introduced him to the Beatles. His parents apparently met over a Stone Roses record.)

That sensibility is evident in his musical influences — “I wanted everything [on drums] to sound like the first two Wilco records,” he says — and in his approach to recording. “Happy Birthday” was recorded almost entirely on four-track cassette tapes, while “Fire From the Hip” uses 24-track reel-to-reel.

The album runs the gamut from its cheeky, surf-rock opener “I’ll Let You Finish” (yes, that is a reference to Kanye West’s infamous speech at the 2009 VMAs) to more ’90s alt-inspired tunes to a surprising dose of straightforward country-folk.

Lyrically, Wolfhard divides his songs into two categories: the “very personal” and the story songs written around books he was reading (“Knockemstiff” by Donald Ray Pollock) or quotes that made him laugh. The personal themes he explores are exactly what you would expect from an early-20s rocker raised in the public eye — namely, relationship expectations and existential fears about the future.

On the nostalgic piano ballad “Good Morning,” he imagines what it might be like to settle down somewhere “with a dog and a wife.”

“I haven’t lived that part of my life yet,” he says now. “So I can really easily get lost in thinking about what that looks like.”

When it comes to sharing his music, especially the more vulnerable tracks, Wolfhard knows his “Stranger Things” fame is the elephant in the room. Anything he sings can and might be used against him in the court of public opinion.

“I could either kind of say nothing and be totally private, because it is scary knowing that everything I say, at least one person will take it a certain way that I wouldn’t want them to. But I just don’t have the control,” he says.

“So if I don’t have the control, then there’s nothing really that I can do, other than try to be as truthful and passionate and well-meaning as I possibly can, you know?”

The double-edged sword of fandom hasn’t stopped Wolfhard or his musically-inclined “Stranger Things” co-stars from pursuing this path. Fellow Hawkins alums Joe Keery (who releases music under the moniker Djo) and Maya Hawke are indie darlings in their own right, and Wolfhard has previously referred to Keery as a mentor. None of them face the unique challenge of relatability in quite the same way, however.

“I’m aware that my specific problems are maybe not as relatable because of how specific of a life I have,” he said. “The only thing I can hope for is that some other person out there listens to it and relates to the same things that I do.”

Sometimes an air of wistfulness accompanies these admissions. When asked about how he feels about Los Angeles, he tells me that it’s complicated: “I think if I wasn’t a young actor, it would be a very different situation.” His favorite parts of the city are its repertory cinemas and lush neighborhoods like Mount Washington, where his godfather resides, because they look the most like Vancouver.

That said, he’s not through with Hollywood. He’ll be back in L.A. for an Oct. 13 show at the Fonda Theatre, and acting and directing are still on the agenda. He would like his next film project — other than the Matt Johnson and Bong Joon Ho projects he’s already committed to, of course — to be something more “personal.”

For now, though, the focus is music. Wolfhard launches a new tour this month, and he’s most looking forward to “doing dumb s—” with his friends.

He tells a quick story to illustrate: When he and the band last toured in Glasgow, Scotland, he was trying to leave the venue without being noticed. (“I have a hard time dealing with fan interaction,” he says.)

“We kind of made it into this joke thing, knowing it wouldn’t work, where me and Rand, my guitarist, were like, ‘let’s switch clothes.’ Rand pretended to be me and I pretended to be Rand,” he says. Miraculously, it worked up until the “very last second” before they stepped on the bus.

“I couldn’t help myself,” he says: He instinctively made eye contact with someone in the crowd. “They did a double take, like, ‘Wait, what?’”

It sounds like a scene straight out of “A Hard Day’s Night” — or maybe inspiration for his next film.

“I’m pretty in my head about things and want them to be a certain way,” he says. “The thing that I have to remind myself all the time is that, like, dude, you’re with your friends, you’re playing music — it’s the best.”

Caught between rural roots and urban opportunities, familial duty, friendship and forbidden carnal desire, young San Kyi (Nandar Myat Aung) struggles to find her place in Fruit Gathering, a sensitive Myanmar-Czechia-France co-production that just won Karlovy Vary’s top prize.

That’s an impressive achievement for Burmese writer-director Aung Phyoe, making his feature debut after several shorts. His flair for blending realist drama with more poetic, painterly imagery makes for a dreamy, hypnotic viewing experience, eased along by a confident, open-hearted performance from Nandar Myat Aung in the lead role. Fruit Gathering will be ripe for picking at further festivals, especially ones specializing in Asian and/or LGBTQ+ fare, possibly followed by niche distribution.

Self-transplanted with her mother (Tin Tin Ei) and grandmother from the countryside to industry-rich Yangon, San Kyi has so far managed to resist the pressure from her mom to get married or pursue a career in something upmarket like tech. Instead, eager for a job that doesn’t demand too much thinking, San Kyi works in a massive clothing factory, sewing seams all day in a ferociously noisy, scrap-strewn environment where the supervisor gets snotty if she takes a bathroom break without seeking permission first.

Incidentally, while the factory hardly looks inviting, the conditions don’t seem to be too bad compared to those seen in older documentaries about East and South Asian sweatshops. They’re comparable to what’s on display in, say, Chinese director Wang Bing’s doc Youth but without the company-owned residential housing. At least the workers are allowed to submit petitions circulated by labor organizers requesting better pay and more safety measures, although tellingly San Kyi refuses to sign lest she might get fired for it. A union leader (Wutt Yee Kyaw) pours scorn on her for not showing more solidarity with her colleagues.

Later, after she’s injured herself by a sewing accident, San Kyi will rethink her position on workers’ rights, but industrial relations in the textile industry are not the film’s main focus. It’s all background color, as much a part of the vivid landscape as the interludes where we see San Kyi back home visiting the mango farms and spirit-dance ceremonies of her agrarian childhood.  

At least it’s at this factory that San Kyi meets Theint Theint Oo (Nandar Myint Lwin), a young co-worker around the same age as San Kyi with a radiant smile and street sense to burn. The two young women start out just hanging together during their lunch breaks but soon grow inseparable. The script suggests early on that Theint Theint may be the kind of pal who always forgets to bring enough cash for dinner. A darker interpretation might posit that she sees San Kyi as little more than a mark, but the truth probably falls somewhere in a grayer area.

Either way, by the time San Kyi is buying nearly identical blouses for the two of them to wear on strolls around town, it’s pretty clear that she’s smitten with Theint Theint. The latter is ambiguously flirtatious and keen to have languid girls’ night sleepovers in the same bed, but also open about the fact that she’s got a man in the background, who is conveniently always away working in another country. Afraid of losing her new limerent object of desire, San Kyi entertains the thought of going abroad with Theint Theint to work as housekeepers or factory workers in somewhere affluent like Singapore or Malaysia.

Clearly, things are heading for a smash up when San Kyi lends Theint Theint a substantial amount of money. Somehow the tension is heightened by the fact that Theint Theint gets closer to San Kyi’s family, even accepting a job offer that comes through the local guy whom San Kyi’s mom was trying to set San Kyi up with as a potential husband. It all serves to underscore how narrowly female relationships are usually defined in highly traditional, painfully patriarchal Myanmar society. The intense feeling between these two young women could never be openly romantic, although no one bats an eye when they walk hand and hand through the streets, much the way Queen Victoria is said to have refused to sign legislation banning lesbianism because she wouldn’t acknowledge such a thing even existed.

Aung Phyoe suggests the messy, uncontrollable nature of desire via some slightly heavy-handed imagery of flooded apartments and generally juicy, watery, somewhat soluble imagery. But the story surprisingly shifts tack halfway through and becomes less interested in the two women’s relationship and more in San Kyi’s personal development, especially after some hard knocks change how she sees the world.

Every so often, the camera will linger on a tiny detail like a vase that has some emotional significance, or the light coming in a window. There’s a tiny hint that these cinematic still life pictures are being seen through San Kyi’s eyes, like scenes in a book told through limited third-person point of view. Indeed, there’s a faintly literary quality to the filmmaking, as if inspired by romance and high-brow fiction, but Aung Phyoe’s touch is feathery soft, as gentle as the soft thud of a mango falling from a tree.

Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky have reportedly split.

The comedy power couple are calling it quits after 18 years of marriage, according to TMZ. A source told the outlet that the pair separated a couple of months ago but remain amicable and plan to continue co-hosting their podcast, “Your Mom’s House.”

Reps for Segura and Pazsitzky did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Segura, 47, and Pazsitzky, 50, tied the knot in November 2008. Segura told “TigerBelly” podcast in 2018 that he met Pazsitzky while they were both doing open mic nights around Los Angeles. She was in a relationship with someone else (whom she lived with), so Segura and Pazsitzky were just friends. According to Segura, there was no flirtation in the early days, and he treated her with the respect he did any other fellow comic.

“I always thought she was attractive, but she was taken,” he said. “And then I got the call from one of my spies. … They broke up. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna swing in there, see what’s up.’”

According to Segura, he tried to ask Pazsitzky on what he thought was an L.A.-appropriate date — a hike — and she said no. He thought that meant she wasn’t interested in him, when, really, she just wasn’t interested in hiking.

“I called her the next time, and she’s like, ‘Hey, I know this bar you can still smoke at. Do you want to go there?’ And I was like, ‘OK. This is why she doesn’t want to go on a hike.’ So then, yeah, we went on dates and it just continued.”

Both comedians have used their marriage as source material for their comedy routines over the years and discuss their relationship on various podcast appearances, but especially on their own podcast, “Your Mom’s House,” which debuted in 2012.

In 2024, Pazsitzky told The Times that when they launched the podcast “we lived in a crummy two-bedroom apartment, we were newlyweds and we had no money. We got a mixing board, two mics and a computer, and at that point, we slept in one room and used the other room as an office. It bordered this other house where this lady would cook the smelliest food and have aggressive sex.”

“Oh, yeah, she was newly divorced and very performative with orgasms too,” Segura added.

The couple, who have two children, also spoke about their relocation from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, in search of a slower pace and easier travel while touring. “Our lives are very normal, and we’re grounded family people. At the end of the day, we come home, our kids fart on Tom’s head, and I make dinner.”