Andrew Scott and Josh O’Connor, who developed a close friendship over the years, share a penchant for independent films about the monsters in our minds that never fail to whip festival audiences into a frenzy. Last year, they departed from those roots to shoot the destined-to-be blockbuster Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Early glimpses reveal O’Connor putting his own spin on one of Scott’s most infamous roles: a hot priest. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but Scott and O’Connor don’t waste time on that. Instead, their relationship is defined by a whole lot of teasing—so much so that when the pair sat down for Scott’s CULTURED cover feature, they had to promise to behave themselves.
Read the full convo here.
Benicio del Toro Opens Up to Scarlett Johansson About On-Set Isolation and Press-Tour Logorrhea
Over the past three decades, Wes Anderson has cultivated a highly eclectic and faithful stable of actors. When the director calls, a motley crew comes running—spanning ages, career phases, and box office favorabilities. It’s like summer camp, but for really successful adults. One recent addition to the menagerie is Academy Award winner Benicio del Toro, who first entered the fray in 2021’s The French Dispatch before returning to star in The Phoenician Scheme. Among the film’s many cameos is Scarlett Johansson, now an Anderson fixture herself. The actor called up her co-star before this year’s Cannes Film Festival for a candid post-mortem in which they hash out their feelings around the modern-day movie-making machine—from on-set angst and press-tour hiccups to confronting themselves on the big screen.
Read the full convo here.
Depending on your disposition, the job of a restaurant critic sounds like either a dream or a nightmare. It takes a special kind of person to dine out six nights a week, sometimes in elaborate disguise; visit the same place at least three and as many as 12 times; and condense the entire experience—as well as what it says about a scene and a moment in time—into around 1,000 words. But while the key job requirements for a restaurant critic haven’t changed in decades, the audience for their work has.
Read Ruth Reichl, Matthew Schneier, and Priya Krishna in convo here.
Artist Lisa Yuskavage Had One Rule for Her Show at the Morgan Library: ‘Never Censor Me’
When Johanna Fateman caught Lisa Yuskavage by phone a month before the opening of her show at the Morgan Library and Museum, she was having a pinch-me moment. The institution is a perfect—maybe perfectly perverse—context for the figurative painter, famous and infamous for her virtuosic rendering of a queasily beautiful, self-consciously vulgar, and often funny world of desire and desolation. The pair talked for nearly two hours about Yuskavage’s journey from ’90s bad-feminist underdog to the honey-badger hotshot she is today and about the trove of drawings she inadvertently kept hidden all the while.
Read the full convo here.
How Do Book Covers Really Get Made? Three Designers Tell All
Can you picture the last cover that made you pick up a book? Even without reading the jacket, there’s plenty to be gleaned from this approximately 6-by-9-inch space. There’s the splashy neon type of a thriller, archival paintings that frequently cover novels by literary It girls, and, well, evocative illustrations on the front of nearly every romance. These days, however, cover designers are also facing unprecedented pressures. To discuss the thrills and challenges of this highly visible but often overlooked job, CULTURED gathered three leading practitioners—Sandra Chiu, Chip Kidd, and Rodrigo Corral—for a candid roundtable discussion.
Read the full convo here.
New York Liberty Owner Clara Wu Tsai on What the Art World Can Learn From Women’s Basketball
Sophia Cohen has spent her fair share of time in sports stadiums and arenas. Like museums, they are special places where a wide variety of people come together with a common goal to witness excellence. The businesswoman and philanthropist Clara Wu Tsai—who owns the Brooklyn Nets, Barclays Center, and, as of 2019, the New York Liberty—is working to bring the worlds of art and sports closer together. A noted collector, she has been collaborating with artists including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sarah Sze, and Rashid Johnson to develop ambitious art for the Brooklyn stadium. Cohen chatted with Wu Tsai about what it means to commission with care and what the art world can learn from her masterclass in reaching new audiences.
Read the full convo here.
Armpit Botox, postpartum depression, extramarital fantasies—nothing is off the table when Tinx and Sarah Hoover sit down for lunch. Both Page Six fixtures released books this year that explore the inner lives of women and push against the societal expectations that seek to constrain them. First, Hoover dropped The Motherload, a memoir about developing, diagnosing, and emerging from postpartum depression. Then, in May, Tinx, known to her followers as “TikTok’s older sister,” released Hotter in the Hamptons, her fiction debut about a rivalry between two women who share a fence out East. Ahead of its release, they connected for a fittingly no-holds-barred midday catch-up.
Read the full convo here.
Sophia Cohen and Dustin Yellin Were Once Burning Man Skeptics. Now, They’re True Believers.
Picture this: it’s 100 degrees, you’re deep in the Nevada desert dancing to disco, and out of the thick dust, artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin appears, moon rock in hand. Just when you thought you were as far away as possible from New York, New York finds you. This surreal scene has become an annual tradition for Sophia Cohen come August, when she attends Burning Man, a weeklong, large-scale event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance that began in the 1980s and has been held annually in the Western United States ever since. Here, she compares notes with Dustin Yellin about festivals past, Burning Man misconceptions, and bringing the event into their daily lives making and selling art in New York.
Read the full convo here.
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