A column that chronicles conversations and events related to the awards circuit.
Interviews with Chadwick and Amanda Boseman, the directors who led him to a posthumous Emmy nomination. Also, a conversation with Amanda Seyfried about the challenges and triumphs she experienced in her role as Elizabeth Holmes for which she received her Emmy nomination.
Emmy ballots are due Monday night so get your act together and vote! Certainly the campaigns have not let up at all even as we head into the final crucial weekend and it won’t stop until it is all officially in the envelope as it were. After a week on vacation in Hawaii, I returned to find piles of boxes waiting for my exacto knife. Abbott Elementarysent an entire ‘back to school’Kit, at the very least back toThatschool.The DropoutAnother box was sent with items such as green juice and a black turtleneck, exactly the same as Elizabeth Holmes’. A box of chocolates was given the names Lucy and Desi to honor Amy Poehler’s multi-nominated Amazon docu. Another box contained Compartes Chocolates, courtesy Emmy nominatedTop ChefJackson Kalb, a competitor, wished me a “Happy First Day of Final-Round Emmy Voting!!”He says he will be serving them in his Venice restaurant Ospi at Emmy night. Official Tommy Lee “Pam And Tommy”The drumsticks that I received were quite cool. I was the only one who sent me the actual Drumsthough. It’s all good.LongThe Emmy season is coming to an end.LongOscar season will be in full swing as Emmys are presented and Oscar contenders unveiled at the Fall Film Festivals of Toronto, Telluride and Venice. It never ends.
CHADWICK BOOSEMAN’S EMMY AND HIS MOST FAMOUS ROLE
Chadwick Boseman tragically died two years ago on August 28, 2020.Finalperformances. This work has led to remarkable awards recognition for the actor over the past few years, starting with the 2020 release.Ma Rainey’s Black BottomHe was nominated for his first leading actor Oscar, BAFTA nominations (he lost out to Anthony Hopkins), and also received posthumous wins from SAG, Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards.
As it turns out, he now has his first-everEmmynomination in the category of Outstanding Voice Over Performance for Disney+ and Marvel’s animation series,What If….?,a series also up for Outstanding Animation Series and representing Marvel’s first foray ever into the TV animation wars. It is currently working on season 2 and is preparing season 3 based on the premise. ‘what if these Marvel heroes had different fates and alter-egos in store?’ In the case of Boseman it takes his most famous role, that of T’Challa and somehow makes him Starlord. This is a bizarre premise that is popular and Boseman was delighted to be part. He is Emmy nominated for the episode in which he is most prominent, as well as in a few other episodes of Season One. I called Boseman earlier this week. What If’s….Bryan Andrews, Executive Producer, talks about the show’s significance to him. Boseman also discusses how the show was for him. Boseman was able to perform most of his voice-over work in person, but could also do it remotely after the pandemic. This is his final work. He would pass away six months later.
“I think Chad was one of the first celebrities, you know, in the MCU that actually officially said yes to us. I think he was literally the first one, and that was an exuberant yes,”Andrews shared his thoughts with me. “He had a bunch of ideas and things. He’s really excited about the character and he also liked that we brought a certain degree of humor, he liked that this character didn’t have the weight of the crown of Wakanda on you so he can be a little bit more of that like charming rogue, a Robin Hood, still totally a great person, insanely confident and charming. But he didn’t have the weight of the crown. And it’s funny, we heard that even before his passing, he enjoyed what he did in our season with that character, so much so that he was talking to (Black Panther director Ryan (Coogler) about trying to get this vibe. ‘It’s like we gotta get some of that into Black Panther 2’ he told Ryan.”
Andrews claimed that Boseman thought beyond his initial foray into animating. “He was having so much fun, and we actually early on, we were thinking, ‘Oh, this can be a spin off series’. We really wanted to do a spin off series with him,”He said he regretted what he had to say, but he also noted that all of his regrettable changes after he unexpectedly died. He kept his cancer secret for many years. “No one had any idea. I mean that came out of the blue for almost everybody. He kept it quiet, ”Andrews stated that he noticed Andrews looked thinner, but that actors tend to gain and lose weight in order to fulfill their roles. “I thought like this is how he likes to roll in the offseason for Black Panther right, so I thought nothing of it, and Istill didn’t think anything of it the final time we recorded him, but I think he may have been in pain. He put on a brave face. He was stoic. He was as strong as he could be. I just chalked it up to ‘oh man, the guys getting ready for Black Panther, he’s probably working out like crazy’. He was a little slower, but his level of focus was intense. So I never knew anything was wrong. None of it ever hindered the performance. He’s so good. He was so good. He brought so much in the way he treated the material. Yeah we were writing it like a Marvel thing anyway, so it wasn’t like he was quote unquote, ‘dumbing it down’ for animation or slumming with animation. We all just looked at it as like this is T’Challa, it’s coming from Marvel, and here we go. He said he was down for this, that ‘this is my character’ and then we got to riff and play a little bit on the lines but he brought 110%. So, that’s amazing.”
How about the Emmy nominations?
“It’s a shame he’s no longer with us, but he would be enjoying this moment, just for the recognition of this for this character. It’s an honor to be recognized and I’m so thankful that the academy was able to notice his performance and pick it out. He brought so much to it.”
AMANDA SEYFRIED REALIZES
Playing real life characters is paying off – awards-wise at least – for Amanda Seyfried who has bagged her first ever Emmy nomination as the notorious Elizabeth Holmes, who as founder of the bogus Theranos, went from Silicon Valley sensation to disgrace in no time flat. Seyfried is nominated as Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series Or Movie for her performance in Hulu’s acclaimedThe Dropout.Holmes was sentenced at a hearing that could see her serve up to 20-years in prison. This irony comes just as Holmes is facing the Primetime Emmys on Sept 12. However, the woman who plays Holmes could receive an award.Emmy.
Portraying an actual real life figure was also the lucky charm for Seyfried at the 93rd Oscars where she got her first Academy Award nomination in Best Supporting Actress as Golden era actress Marion Davies in David Fincher’s 2020 look at the man who wrote Citizen Kane,a film calledMank.
In a recent zoom interview, she explained to me that she was filming in Harlem for a new project she was working on with Tom Holland. She also said she is aware of the two fates of Holmes as one is on television and one is about to be sent to prison. “Now, the idea that the Emmys are happening in September and she’s also going to be sentenced in September is not lost on me. It’s not. It just gets weirder and weirder and I don’t know if I’m, as an actor, done with her story because I just had such a good time doing it, but also as a spectator, as somebody who’s empathetic to the things she’s going to have to go through separate from how I feel about her choices. It’s weird. It’s hard and it sucks that she’s in such a different place,”I was told by her that you must have empathy to be able to play Holmes or any other real person.
“Our job as actors portraying these people is you have to care about them or else you’re not really going to play the whole spectrum. I mean, we are all so complicated, we are such a complicated creatures whether we’re famous, infamous, you know, just whatever choices we make in life, we’re still all very nuanced. And so, I was very empathetic to those eccentricities and those, those moments of, of fear that everybody feels. You know, I’m not a psychologist, I can’t diagnose her with anything, I just saw her as a human being who found herself in a bind and chose the wrong, the wrong way to deal with it. And so, it’s all empathy, I mean, it’s not like I’m making her out to be a victim or anything like that, because that’s, that’s totally wrong, too,”She spoke.
Among the challenges Seyfried says she faced was just the simple fear of embodying someone who is so different from herself, and yes, that unique – and controversial – voice Holmes used, some say created actually to sound more like a man. “The thing is she’s not from anywhere. She’s doesn’t have any regional accent. Somebody I spoke to during the preparation said that it sounded like she was part of some women’s business school sorority type club, if that makes any sense. So, I researched that a little bit and then I came to realize that it didn’t matter where it came from, when it started, it just had to be present at all times. And so, not the depth so much, not the frequency, but the mouth shape,”She elaborates. “And I was like, okay, what can I control? I can control how I move my mouth and make it sound like her, so I just did until it was muscle memory. And now, my next step is to be able to deepen it, and that was hard, but it wasn’t as much of an issue with, if I got the mouth shape right the depth came later.”
The DropoutLimited Series are a growing series that focuses exclusively on women involved in criminal and/or deceitful activities. You can continue to add to this list in the coming yearThe Thing about Pam, The Girl From Plainville. Impeachment: American Crime Story. Candy. Inventing Anna.etc. What’s up with all this kind of storytelling now? “I think we’re just sick of seeing stories about men, right? I’d like to think that that’s what it is. I’d like to think that, you know, these stories are real true stories of human beings and they happen to be about women, I mean, and each one of them is incredibly smart or creative in a way. And you’re just, like, kind of in awe of the power that they have to ruin or create such chaos you kind of can’t look away. And I will always be a fan of the true crime stories. I think that people don’t expect them to behave this way. We’re not as surprised when a guy, you know, defrauds people for millions and millions of dollars. We’re not as surprised,”She laughed.
Seyfried, while primarily a movie actress, found it easy to transition into television.The Dropout. “I go where the good roles are. I mean, things have shifted so much in how we digest things. And you know I think just as someone who watches a lot of content I do lean towards the episodics more these days, it seems like everybody’s kind of going for what moves them. And as an audience member i want to invest eight hours into somebody’s story because you get so much more out of it, and it seems like everybody seems to feel that way, so there’s just more TV than there are movies being made,”She spoke.
“I never did see myself doing episodics until this whole limited series niche. This limited series category came about because there is the same amount of commitment as a movie is without having to sign away seven years of your life, which is how TV used to work. And it is more interesting, especially for an actor, because you have so much more to do, so much more to learn about your character. There’s so much more of an arc and that’s served me well. It was definitely the most, the most fulfilling experience playing Elizabeth over the course of four months.”
What about going to her first Emmy ceremony, as a nominee?
“Listen, I’m nervous about it. I wasn’t nervous at the Oscars, because I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell that I was going to win it. It was just about the nomination. Getting the nomination was, like, a massive deal for me, but this I feel like I’m closer. But you know the people I’m up against are heavy hitters… I think I just have to let go and just have fun because there are so many things that the whole show is nominated for. So, another great part of going to the Emmys is that I’m going to see a lot of people. It’s “post-pandemic.” I’m saying that in quotes, of course,” she laughed. “But its post-pandemic and I think I’m going to be able to socialize with a lot of the people that I had so much fun making this show with. I’m going to bring my husband (actor Thomas Sadoski). He has another premiere (Sony’s Devotion) that night at the Toronto Film Festival and he’s skipping it to come with me because I said if I win, and you’re not there, then that would be a major bummer.”